


By Your Hands Alone

by navigatorsghost



Category: The Transformers (Cartoon Generation One)
Genre: Battle, Body Worship, Canon-Typical Violence, Clueless Virgins, Consensual, Demisexuality, Dom/sub, Eavesdropping, Feelings, Gun Kink, Loyalty Kink, M/M, Missing Hardware, Multi, Praise Kink, Rough Sex, Tactile Sexual Interfacing, Transformers Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing, Unicron is a bastard, Voyeurism, black blood and purple prose, inventing sex from first principles, no seriously really clueless, or closest Transformers equivalent, past trauma, servitude, tech headcanons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:40:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 41,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23725462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navigatorsghost/pseuds/navigatorsghost
Summary: Unicron wanted control. His creations want connection. Where there's a will, there's usually a way... but there may be some confusion beforehand.
Relationships: Cyclonus/Scourge, Galvatron/Cyclonus, Galvatron/Cyclonus/Scourge, Galvatron/Scourge, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 194
Kudos: 78





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's been my headcanon for a while that the Unicronian triad are structurally different from Cybertronian Transformers in certain minor but important regards. But why would _they_ ever notice as much... unless they had a reason to check?
> 
> (Set sometime early in Season 3 of the G1 cartoon. Rated E (uprated from previous M) for auraplay and tactile-type interfacing, some rough sex and the usual D/s command dynamics, all very much consensual.)
> 
> [Updated note: this fic is turning into something way longer and more complicated than I originally set out to write. It was supposed to be just about my OT3 figuring out sex, but apparently now it's about them figuring out how to have feelings for each other as well and they are all terrible at it. Now finally with actual porn, starting at Chapter 13!]

As he came around the corner of a low-ceilinged corridor in the storage sub-level below the Decepticon base, Cyclonus's first thought was that he had interrupted a fight.

It was unusual, however, to see the Battlechargers fighting each other rather than teaming up on someone else. He frowned and looked again. Runabout had Runamuck pinned against the wall, and their frames were crushed together about as closely as looked mechanically possible. Runamuck was struggling and clawing at his teammate's back; both were panting, engines revved up and cooling systems whining under strain. It would have looked like any ordinary Decepticon scuffle, of the type Cyclonus had to break up every duty shift, if not for two things.

The first was that both participants had access panels open on their flanks, and were connected to each other by several trailing wires.

The second, which might have escaped a lesser observer, was that their electromagnetic auras were dripping with excess charge and emotional imprints that Cyclonus could only translate as _pleasure_. He and his wingmates were all adept at reading fields to a degree that the common Decepticons couldn't rival. He didn't think it at all likely that he was mistaken in his interpretation.

But that only made the situation all the more obscure. He stepped forward, with a deliberate crash of his boot against the stone-flagged floor. "What are you two doing?"

From the way both of them jumped, they had had no idea he was there. Which meant that if he had by some chance been an Autobot spy, they could both be dead. Cyclonus sighed and added "lack of due situational awareness" to his mental dossiers on both of them, as Runamuck summoned the coordination to glare at him. "What does it look like?"

The silence after that went on for a sparkpulse too long. Cyclonus inwardly cursed, knowing his confusion must have shown on his face, realising too late that he had unwittingly stumbled over a vitally important gap in his databanks. "Nothing you should be doing where I have to see it," he growled, covering his ignorance as best he could and at least secure in the knowledge that this was _not_ something anyone did in corridors as a matter of course. "Save it for your quarters and get back to your posts!"

"...yes, sir." Runabout visibly drooped and started disconnecting the cables - Runamuck whined uncomfortably, and Runabout hissed something quiet to him. The two of them skulked away a moment later, panels now closed and order superficially restored, but Cyclonus caught snatches of their departing conversation.

"-really _didn't_ know?"

"Eeh, he should figure it out then! No wonder he's always cranked so tight, hehe..."

***

The encounter continued to nag at Cyclonus for the rest of the on-shift. He would have been curious regardless, but the fact that they had clearly expected him to _understand_ what he had interrupted elevated it to a legitimate priority. If this odd form of not-combat was something that the Decepticons in general practised and recognised, then sooner or later - as today - his ignorance was going to catch him out, and Cyclonus was displeased by that prospect. Knowledge was power, and given how hard he had to work to maintain his authority with the rank and file, any deficiencies in his understanding of the universe were sure to be exploited somehow.

Still, this wouldn't be the first time he had had to adjust his parameters to allow for the lesser Decepticons' idiosyncrasies. He grasped, intellectually, how their minds worked, but there was nothing intuitive in that understanding. Their characters, for the most part, were a mismatched assortment of vices, greed, and self-interest. Their ambitions were multifarious, but inevitably devoid of the competence it would take to achieve them. They were short-sighted, easily swayed; their cultural dynamics were a bewildering network of bribery, corruption, obscure personal alliances and mutual complaining.

To Cyclonus, coded to place his duty above all else and possessing little if anything in the way of private aspirations, all of that made dealing with the army at large into an ongoing season in hell. But this new situation transcended mere annoyance and reached into outright peculiarity, given that he didn't even know _what_ he had seen let alone the significance of it. When his shift ended, he handed over to Scourge in a state of considerable distraction and made his way up to the _Dis_.

The closest thing he had to truly private quarters was his altmode's dedicated drop bay beneath the warship's bridge. With their current fuel crisis he had no expectations of getting to enter battle from there any time soon, but flight bay zero was still very much _his_. If there was one place in the galaxy where even his triadmates were unlikely to interrupt him without warning, it was there.

He made his way into the bay and knelt on the deck, the lights turned low and the drop hatch beneath him sealed closed. In the back of his awareness he could feel the _Dis'_ presence, the great ship's half-sleeping consciousness mingling with the muted thrum of low-powered systems through the dark steel walls around him. It didn't feel like an intrusion. Having the _Dis_ there was more like feeling an echo of his own spark's pulse.

He half-shuttered his optics, and cleared his caches to bring his attention fully back to his earlier encounter. So far, despite his speculations, he had no real guess at what those open panels on the Battlechargers' flanks had contained, and that was clearly the crux of the mystery. They had been using some protocol that allowed two mechs to connect to each other, that much was clear, but he was at a loss to understand _why_.

Searching for a frame of reference, he turned his attention inwards. He clicked back the latches of his chestplate, and allowed it to split down its midline seam and fold smoothly open. Violet-edged silver light unfurled into the darkness, pouring through the armourcrystal window in his lasercore shielding.

Cyclonus was as heavily defended inside as out, a war machine to the very centre of his being. He couldn't imagine having _any_ possible connection point as easily accessible as those the Battlechargers had been using. Nonetheless, on the right of his spark shielding there was an inner, armoured panel. Cyclonus retracted it with a thought and carefully probed his fingers underneath, exploring the systems concealed there.

There were almost no hardlink input or output connections on his frame at all, but those he had were under that cover, secured behind two thicknesses of Unicron-forged armour and consciously-controlled locks. A couple of diagnostic ports: nonstandard, designed to connect only with the _Dis'_ automated repair bay equipment. A set of heavy-duty jack ports for emergency recharging, or for life-support power feeds in the event that he somehow lost the use of his own generation systems. Accompanying those, a set of equally heavy cables that would, at need, allow him to hook up to the corresponding ports on one of his triadmates and give _his_ charge to _them_.

But that was a last-ditch emergency procedure. To try to sustain Galvatron's or even Scourge's power demands as well as his own, however briefly, would drain his fuel tanks and could as easily push him offline with them as keep them alive. It was a short-term failsafe, the last resort for a situation they were never supposed to find themselves in... and it assuredly wasn't something he could imagine doing casually in a corridor.

The only possible conclusion was that the Battlechargers had been using some set of hardware that he lacked altogether. It must be trivially nonessential, in that case, since he knew his creator had gone to great lengths to equip him and his wingmates with the necessary tools for any eventuality that they might face. If those systems possessed any serious, functional value, he would have them - so whatever Runabout and Runamuck had been doing, it hadn't been _important_. But, to judge by their response to being interrupted and their surprise at his ignorance, _they_ had thought it was not only important but universally recognised as meaningful.

So this was a cultural issue, rather than a purely operational one. Cyclonus sighed. Unpicking the sordid intricacies of Decepticon social mores was one of his least favourite ways to waste time. Still, in his experience thus far, there was no such thing as a disciplinary issue that came up once and then solved itself; and it was sticking in his mind that whatever they had been doing, it had apparently been _pleasurable_. Intensely so, indeed. That was a warning light. Pleasure, indulgence, and self-gratification were highly effective distractions for most of the army, and distracted troops didn't fight well and didn't maintain discipline.

Much to his dismay, he really was going to have to get to the bottom of this.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And here we have the chapter in which Cyclonus totally bottles it and decides to do the super-easy research first. No porn here yet, sorry, just a lot of tech headcanons and one very confused Unicronian...

_How_ he was going to get to the bottom of this was another matter, Cyclonus knew. He could hardly demand an explanation from the Battlechargers without confirming everything they were already thinking about him, and if he did, he wouldn't put it past them to tell him some ridiculous fiction in a bid to make him look even more foolish. Bringing up the topic out of nowhere with any of the other Decepticons was clearly asking for trouble as well.

The easiest place to start, he concluded, was by determining a baseline; using data to which he did have immediate, and, more importantly, _private_ access. He made his way up to the _Dis'_ forge deck.

Despite its being part of the ship like any other, he always found this particular deck to be a subtly uncomfortable place. It was dark and expansive, echoing with a melancholy desolation. Its vast automated foundries stood silent and inert, shadowy cenotaphs to the army they no longer had. Whereas the great machines had been intended to turn out flights of drones by the score in pursuit of universal conquest, now they stirred only occasionally, to construct spare parts for the Unicronians themselves or - more often - the surviving Sweeps.

But to do even that small share of work, they needed the relevant schematics. Sitting at the control console for the forges, Cyclonus opened up the _Dis'_ encrypted blueprint libraries and began to examine them.

It felt strange to be looking so intimately at himself and his wingmates from such an oddly detached vantage point. Everything they _were_ , save only the unquantifiable parameters of their sparks, was indexed in the _Dis'_ databanks. Wireframes and circuit diagrams, vast component registries and charts of machining specifications, everything down to the crystal structure of the alloys in their armour: it was all there. Unicron had stinted nothing in the documentation of his prize creations.

For the next half an hour, Cyclonus compared, considered, concluded. As he had expected, he found no signs that any of them had - or ever should have had - external connective hardware beyond the most minimal essentials. All their frames were masterpieces of protective engineering. Their armour was forged in the largest possible single pieces, contoured and layered to minimise the chance of any access being forced. Heavy silicon-polymer seals closed off potential weak spots wherever a seam was unavoidable, and the few maintenance panels they had were multiply secured with both physical and cognitive locks. Even their essential diagnostic and emergency charging ports seemed only grudgingly included, and in all three sets of schematics they were double-armoured and kept close by the lasercore where they would always be automatically monitored and protected. No blanking plates or obvious dead-ends in their circuitry hinted at any past excision of components. They were, and they always had been, as invulnerable as their creator could possibly make them.

As military design went, it verged on high art. Cyclonus lingered admiringly over Galvatron's wireframes, at once thrilled and reassured to see such vast power displayed in conjunction with defences worthy of a fortress let alone a single mech. There were quite simply no weaknesses, no flaws, no detail that he looked at and saw cause for concern. If nothing else, at least he had no need to fear unduly for his lord's physical safety.

Or, for that matter, his ability to enforce his will. Galvatron had truly been Unicron's ultimate weapon; but with Unicron gone, all that power was now Galvatron's alone to wield as he saw fit, and the details of his blueprints only confirmed that little in the galaxy could even hope to stand against him. Cyclonus shivered, his wings twitching at the ache between his shoulders. He tried, these days, to suppress all thoughts of his original function, but looking at his own blueprints was an inescapable reminder. If anything, _he_ was arguably the most vulnerable of his triad, thanks to the slave-coding and pilot systems that fitted him to serve as an extension of Galvatron's will in battle...

But even those didn't represent nearly such a radical weakness as open ports and cables kept beneath simple external panels. Unicron's interface systems used only touch-contact and heavily firewalled, customised software. Without the right counterpart code and subdermal fingertip circuitry, there was quite simply no way for a would-be intruder to even activate Cyclonus's combat systems or the _Dis'_ command interface - let alone to control either of them, and Cyclonus was reassured by that knowledge. He was secure: sheathed in inviolate armour and with his cognitive architecture packed with defences, an adamantium lock to which his lord held the only surviving key.

The thought of ever trading that security for a hardlink system that created unknown levels of access compatibility was a chilling one. 

Whatever the Battlechargers had been doing, however, they had been _enjoying_ it. So much so, indeed, that they hadn't even noticed the presence of a senior officer who was making no effort to hide. Was exchanging data really that pleasurable...?

He shivered again at the memories of Galvatron's touch-linked presence overwhelming his metaprocessor, and was forced to concede that _yes_ , it could be. But that was in the context of an operational protocol, something Galvatron did only when he needed Cyclonus's service and firepower. Runabout and Runamuck, by contrast, had been caught in what amounted to active dereliction of duty.

Which must have required quite the temptation, given the potential consequences. They could count themselves lucky that he had stumbled across them and not Galvatron. Cyclonus wondered what Galvatron _would_ have made of that spectacle. Would he have demanded an explanation, before handing down discipline? If so, would he have received one... and would it have made any sense if he had?

There was probably no explanation that would have satisfied Galvatron, in truth, as his reaction would likely have been a revulsion that far transcended Cyclonus's distaste. Galvatron abhorred the notion of any kind of violation or interference with his frame and systems, let alone his processors and databanks; even the Unicronians' own touch-tech was acceptable to him only because _he_ had the final upstream protocols for it, and therefore always had the upper hand of any connection forged through it. The idea of mechs physically plugging themselves into each other and exchanging who-knew-what, with all the potential for coercion and sabotage that it implied, would unquestionably be the stuff of the Herald's nightmares.

Though that did lead Cyclonus to the thought that at some point Galvatron quite possibly _would_ catch the Battlechargers or someone else _in flagrante_ making use of this mysterious protocol. Which made it even more urgent for Cyclonus to understand what was going on, and possibly find some opportunity to brief Galvatron about it as carefully as need be, well before that happened.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apparently the muses are on a roll at the moment, so here's the next chapter. Comes with (a bit of) actual porn this time. Chapter rated M for plug-and-play interfacing, with apologies to the Battlechargers for dragging them into this...

Logically, Cyclonus decided, the next step in his research would be to get a look at some of the common Decepticons' blueprints to see exactly what hardware they had and how it was connected. However, that was going to be easier said than done. Warframe schematics counted as military intel, and thus were automatically treated as classified. Individual mechs carried their own blueprints stored in their subconscious memory, but assuredly wouldn't give them up without wanting to know why; and full schematic archives, such as Cyclonus ideally needed, were compiled only in repair bays and frame-forges. Access to those was restricted to mechs with the appropriate security clearance.

As Air Commander and effective 2IC of the entire army, Cyclonus of course _had_ that level of clearance. What he didn't have was an excuse to demand such sensitive data that wouldn't prompt speculation among everyone who heard about it. He certainly couldn't go and shake down the Constructicons without provoking gossip from one end of Charr to the other, and the only other mech whose skillset cleared him to have mass blueprint access was Soundwave - who wouldn't gossip but would _remember_ , and probably try to hold a favour over Cyclonus at the worst possible moment in return. That wouldn't do at all.

That left him with one more option; which was still likely to cost him some dignity and result in him owing a favour, but at least only to someone he could sit on as hard as he had to. He departed the _Dis_ and flew back down to Charr's surface.

The planetside base's monitor room was only a lower-quality replica of its far better equipped counterpart aboard the _Dis_ , but the similarities were sufficient that Cyclonus at least felt at home walking through the doors. Sadly, a second glance would reveal that the screens and data-servers in here were scavenged rebuilds instead of the warship's sleek Unicron-forged hardware, and the walls were an erratic mix of welded panels and Charr's glitter-dark stone. Scourge's command chair at the main console creaked like a Junkion with a hangover whenever the tracker shifted his weight in it.

"Scourge."

Scourge barely looked up from the data cascading down the screens in front of him. The chair creaked regardless. "You need something?" he asked.

Cyclonus didn't take offence, well aware that Scourge didn't have to turn round to be paying attention to him. He did, however, gesture to the pair of Sweeps who were huddled against the back wall and quietly chattering to each other. "You two, get out. And I don't mean stick your audials to the other side of the door."

"Uh - yessir, Commander Cyclonus, sir."

The Sweeps beat a hasty retreat. Scourge did turn his chair, at that. "You _definitely_ need something," he observed, raising his superoptic ridges slightly.

"I _need_ damage control," Cyclonus said with a sigh. He came over to Scourge's side and propped his hip on the console's edge. "At least, I suspect I do."

He'd thought of simply ordering Scourge to get him what he wanted without offering an explanation, but now that he was sitting here with his wingmate, his instincts were urging him to share what he knew. Scourge was the intel specialist of the three of them; giving him complete data to work with was likely to produce better results than asking him to operate blind. "Pull up whatever surveillance logs you have on the east corridor of sub-level two, specifically the stretch just beyond storage room C. Timeframe... try fourteen-zero to fourteen-twenty this afternoon." That span of time ought to supply the full chronicle of whatever the Battlechargers had been doing, not only Cyclonus's intervention in it.

"I can do that." Scourge reached for the console, energon-tipped claws flickering across the virtual keyboard. "What am I looking for, or will it be obvious when I see it?"

"Believe me, it was hard to miss."

A side screen crackled to life, showing the static-laced footage typical of the base's surveillance recorders. The basement corridor lay empty, just another innocent, dusty corner of this derelict world.

"Nothing," Scourge said with a shrug, and touched the console to speed up the playback. Moments later, two figures scurried into view at comical speed, and Scourge slowed the clip back down. "The Battlechargers? Is this what you were looking for?"

"Yes, I'm curious to know exactly what they were doing." Cyclonus leaned in closer to see. "Do we have audio?"

"We do, but it won't be good," Scourge said apologetically. "This is one of the recorders that only _just_ works." He made a helpless gesture, wide-opticked in response to Cyclonus's frown. "Don't look at me like that. We only have the gear we have, and the dust gets into everything."

"Hmph," Cyclonus said, making a mental note to add "more surveillance equipment" to the list of procurement priorities for the next raid.

At first, on the staticky recording, Runabout and Runamuck looked like any two common soldiers stuck on a boring patrol. Walking close together, chattering inaudibly, poking their elbows into each other's sides and swatting at each other as Decepticons did to express casual comradeship. Nothing odd there.

And then Runabout said something that the audio pickups missed. Runamuck let out a laugh that sounded mildly deranged even by his standards and, grinning, reached over and grabbed his teammate's flank. Runabout struck his hand away, spun on him, shoved him into the wall like he was starting a fight, and so far so _normal-_

-what _wasn't_ normal was that instead of shoving him back, Runamuck laughed again and caught hold of Runabout by both hips, pulling him in closer. The white Battlecharger tipped his head back and Runabout leaned in, close enough that he must have either retracted his battlemask or smashed it against his teammate's face - the camera didn't show enough to make that entirely clear - and then the beleaguered audio pickups caught a loud, hastily stifled groan.

"What the-" Scourge began.

"I told you it was hard to miss," Cyclonus said dryly.

"You weren't wrong." Scourge's optics widened as the two mechs on the screen clinched and scuffled with each other in what looked almost like a wrestling hold, rough enough that the squeak of bending metal and the ragged roar of grounder engines carried clearly over the scratchy audio feed. Runamuck made another attempt to laugh, then was cut off with a choking noise as his teammate apparently did _something_ to silence him; but, undeterred, he gripped Runabout's flank and squeezed and rubbed there as though he expected a reaction-

-and he got one, as that mysterious panel on the black Battlecharger's side popped open under the assault it was being subjected to. Runamuck instantly shoved his fingers under it; Runabout bucked, tossing his head up with a strangled noise and briefly disclosing that both of them had indeed retracted their masks. Without context, Cyclonus's first thought would have been that Runabout was actually in pain.

If he was it clearly wasn't the kind of pain he minded, as he only ground his frame harder against his teammate's, pushing Runamuck back into the wall. Runamuck let out a gleeful sort of yelp at the additional abuse and pulled a handful of trailing cable ends out from under Runabout's panel, fumbling them to his own side where a corresponding cover plate was now hanging open in turn.

The camera angle obscured some of what followed, but Cyclonus could mentally fill in the details. That had to be Runamuck stuffing those plugs into whatever ports he had to receive them, and the way the two shuddered and whined and clutched at each other made it clear that the resulting connection must feel singularly good for both of them. Runamuck reached around and grabbed his teammate's aft, visibly squirming. " _Heee_ \- oohyeah-"

"Keep your _voice_ down," Runabout panted, in tones of more conspiracy than reproach. " _There..._ "

The sound of metal crashing on stone made Cyclonus jump even though he had known it was coming. His own voice, distorted by static, echoed on the recording as he stepped into the camera's field of view. " _What are you two doing?_ "

After that, the footage didn't tell him anything that his own memories couldn't. He let it play out regardless so that Scourge could get the rest of the story, then as all three participants in the scene made their way out of shot he turned to the tracker and spread his hands. "What do you make of _that?_ " he asked.

"...it looked like they were having a really good time?" Scourge sounded mildly shellshocked.

"That's why this is concerning me."

"I see your point." His fields where they lapped against Cyclonus's were a tangle of confusion, surprise and complicated discomfort, before he turned up his lockdowns and tugged them in as though he didn't want to share the details of his feelings right now. "Right in the _corridor?_ Where anyone could've - where _Galvatron_ could've caught them?"

"That's _exactly_ why this is concerning me."

They looked at each other.

"I just want to be clear," Scourge said, "that I have a really bad feeling about this."

"And _I_ want to be clear that that's not going to get you out of helping me solve it."

The corner of Scourge's mouth twitched under his moustache. "Of course it isn't. What do you need me to do?"


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another quick chapter, once again with no porn in it.

Cyclonus found himself oddly suspicious at that, and wasn't even sure what he was suspicious _of_.

Scourge had agreed to help, had barely even argued. The fact that the tracker had shuttered his fields and was therefore presumably trying to hide something could just be... well, just Scourge. Scourge was _always_ hiding things, it was in his nature. Knowledge was power and secrets doubly so, and Cyclonus appreciated that as the weakest and least-ranked of their triad, Scourge generally needed some kind of unfair advantage.

Right now, though, the _lack_ of knowledge was putting Cyclonus's own hard-won power in jeopardy, so on this occasion if Scourge _did_ have information he'd better start talking. "You can start by telling me what you know. This may be the first I've heard of whatever this is, but you see far more than I do. Is anyone else doing this?"

Scourge's superoptic ridges drew together. "If they are, they're keeping it very quiet," he said. "I'd have remembered if I'd seen something like that." He hunched his wings up a little and looked away from Cyclonus's gaze, and Cyclonus wondered exactly what he was so embarrassed about. "And if the Sweeps had, I'd have picked it up in data-collation."

"So it's _not_ happening regularly? Then why did they act like I ought to know what they were doing?" Cyclonus asked in frustration, mostly to himself.

Scourge's expression had gone distant, and the lights of his optics flickered as he searched through his internal databanks. "I've not seen _that_ before," he said slowly. "But now that I'm looking again..."

"What?"

"There's been a few things that started the same way, but didn't go anywhere. With the-" Scourge made a rather incoherent hand gesture. "The grabbing at each other in private or behind walls, like it's something they want to do but not get caught doing. But until now it's been breaking up before it goes as far as what we just saw."

Well, _that_ was interesting. "Any patterns? Any particular culprits?"

"The Battlechargers again, in their quarters that time... Drag Strip and Wildrider, outside in the ruins, but that _did_ just end in a fight... Drag Strip and _Breakdown_ , but again, it trailed off. Huh - Blast Off and Onslaught _and_ Vortex, and that time it looked like Onslaught deliberately stopped it..."

"Onslaught isn't as stupid as it would be convenient for him to be," Cyclonus observed. Much as the idiocy of the common Decepticons frustrated him, the ones who were clever enough to be dangerous were almost worse. "If anyone on this base was likely to remember that you can see through walls..."

"It would be him or Soundwave. Who has always had his quarters and workroom so full of jamming equipment that even I can't see what goes on in there, so he and his crew could be doing anything." Scourge shrugged, claws spread helplessly. "That's about all I have. Does that tell you anything?"

"It tells me this _is_ going to keep happening, which is just what I was afraid of," Cyclonus replied with a sigh. "And that it isn't only the Battlechargers, though apparently they're particularly focused on it. Whatever _it_ is."

"Well, there are two things you put through cables," Scourge said. "Power and data. Which do you think that was?"

"I intend to find out, but for that I need access to the other Decepticons' schematics. Ideally as many of them as possible, for comparison." He aimed a pointed smile at Scourge. "That's the next thing I need your help with."

Scourge nodded in understanding. "Because you don't want to have to explain to the Constructicons why you want to know," he said, with an answering suggestion of a grin.

Cyclonus sighed, realising that he really shouldn't have expected Scourge to miss that. "Exactly," he admitted.

Scourge turned back to the console in front of him. Data scrolled up the main screen, then was replaced by an elaborate wireframe construct that Cyclonus didn't begin to understand the meaning of. Scourge flipped it, rotated it, zoomed in, and then nodded as though he'd learned something. "I can get into the repair bay mainframe," he said. "And I should be able to do it without leaving any tracks. Give me some time."

He turned his chair again, leaning back in it to look up at Cyclonus. The chair creaked. "You're going to owe me a favour for this."

Cyclonus gave him a long, flat look, holding the silence until the tracker looked just about to twitch. " _Scourge._ "

Scourge sighed and lowered his wings in surrender. "At least tell me whatever you find out," he said.

"I will," Cyclonus conceded, not mentioning that he'd been intending to do that anyway. "In the meantime, _don't_ mention this to anyone. Not even Galv-"

" _Cyclonus!_ "

-speak of the Void and its gaze will find you. //Coming, my lord,// he sent back quickly, and pushed off the console edge to his feet. "Get on with it, Scourge. I'll see you later."

"On it." Scourge was already turning back to his screens as Cyclonus strode from the room, hastily dumping all his concerns out of working memory as he went. Whatever Galvatron required of him, the last thing he needed was to be worrying about _this_ at the same time.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which nobody can catch a break. Warnings for discussion of sex some of which is a bit pressuring/coercive (though nothing actually happens), threats of violence, general Decepticonry, and Cyclonus not being all sweetness and light. Still no porn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I initially uploaded this chapter a week or so back, and then almost immediately decided I was unhappy with some of the dialogue and took it down. This is the edited version, which I think is less heavy-handed and I'm more comfortable with. Thank you for your patience, dear readership!]

The next two hours kept Cyclonus comfortably preoccupied. Galvatron had been struck with inspiration for a new grand plan to eradicate the Autobots and conquer the galaxy, which meant that he needed Cyclonus to - well, mostly to listen and say "yes, my lord" in the right places while Galvatron worked out all the details himself. Cyclonus's contributions had been mainly logistical, reporting on their materiel and fuel stocks and suggesting which worlds they might be able to raid to fill in any gaps. It was the kind of tasking he enjoyed, useful enough to be rewarding, not so frustrating as to run him ragged. _And_ he got to watch Galvatron's mind work, which was a privilege he never tired of.

By the time Galvatron dismissed him, Charr's cooling corpse of a sun was quietly falling off the edge of the world, meaning it was notionally the beginning of the planetary night cycle. Not that the dim white dwarf star vanishing below the horizon made a meaningful difference to the light levels, but Cyclonus still noted its departure. As though driven by some atavistic impulse, the Decepticons always seemed to become more unruly at night.

They hadn't better do so now, because all Cyclonus wanted was to go and refuel and recharge. He'd substantially overrun his duty watch by letting himself get distracted by the Battlechargers' antics and then being drawn into Galvatron's ad-hoc planning session - not that he at all resented the latter at least, but if he was going to keep his edge he still needed to rest before he had to take over from Scourge again. Getting into the habit of neglecting his own operational requirements and calling it duty would be false loyalty indeed.

He was making his way back from checking on the energon stockpile - he had been the one to insist they stash it well away from the main base, in case of saboteurs or accidents - when he heard voices. Voices coming from behind a broken wall set back from the cracked, dusty pavement, low and urgent and somehow sounding guilty even before he could make out the words.

Cyclonus stopped. He stood still, tightened his lockdowns, engaged his stealth protocols. The low whine of his engines fell whisper-quiet. His camo-reactive paint shifted to match the desaturated indigo of Charr's endless shadows. Silent, with the possible exception of an internal sigh so loud he felt sure half the galaxy must have heard it, he moved towards the wall.

"-not interested, okay?"

"Come on, how long has it been? I don't know about you, but this is the longest _I've_ been mothballed since I didn't have a body!"

"Y'know, that's _not_ the hottest thing anyone's ever said to me!"

"What, me not having a-"

" _I don't wanna think about it!_ "

Octane and Swindle. Well, _there_ was a combination that couldn't lead to anything good. Cyclonus stayed quiet and listened, wanting to know what they were plotting before he decided whether to intervene.

"Well, don't then! I've got one _now_." Swindle's voice was lowered, coaxing, and the oily gloss of his tone made Cyclonus's lip curl in disgust. "What's really putting you off? And don't forget, I'm older than you. I guarantee I can show you a thing or two..."

"Maybe I don't wanna see it, Swindle," Octane retorted, scoffing. "Hate to break it to ya, but you ain't exactly my type."

"You _wound_ me. Not even if I throw in a few of my execs? Golden Age, top quality..."

"Mech, any exec I got from you would probably be _ransomware_. And besides, ain't nobody's gonna have much of a good time on the kind of rations we're getting. I'm keeping what I got in my tanks, get me?"

"Well, if it's _fuel_ you want, why didn't you say so?" Swindle's voice pitched upwards in sudden enthusiasm, an unctuous whine that made Cyclonus longingly contemplate shoving his pistol down the Combaticon's throat. "A big strong mech like you, we both know you'll be all ready to go as soon as you get yourself topped off, so why don't you come with me to where there's a whole _stash_ of energon just back there? You've got the big tanks, you help me clear out all we can carry, and _then_ we can have our own private party, just you and me. How about that for a deal?"

"Oh, no. Nuh- _uh_. Trust me, nobody hates empty tanks more'n me, but that stash you're talkin' about is _guarded_ and I'm not risking my neck with Galvatron and his goons just because _you_ want your wires tweaked-"

"A very wise decision, Octane!"

" _Hhhk!_ " Swindle's optics popped wide, alarm bursting in his fields like a flak shell. "Cyclonus! Uh, we were just-"

"I heard." He had stepped up onto the edge of the broken wall before revealing himself and he towered over even Octane, his laser pistol's muzzle unwavering as he covered the two of them. "Discussing raiding the energon stockpile?"

"Eeeeh-" Swindle raised his hands placatingly. "Not _as such-_ "

"Hey, I'm just in the wrong place at the wrong time," Octane said hastily. "I wasn't gonna do this loser any favours, I swear!"

Cyclonus gave him a level look. "I _might_ believe you. But _you_ , Swindle-"

"I didn't do anything! You can't shoot me for _not_ doing anything!"

"Believe me, I can. Or I can report this to Galvatron, and he _certainly_ can."

"Nonono-!"

The static-sharp jolt of genuine fear in Swindle's aura was deliciously satisfying - all the more so for knowing that Swindle and Octane wouldn't be able to feel his reaction to it. With his lockdowns set, he was projecting the emotional equivalent of a cold steel wall. Was he persuaded? Was he appeased? Was he just enjoying threatening them?

No way for them to know, and that in itself was power. "Or perhaps I should provide you with some more lasting disincentive. Mechs like you have a habit of forgetting they were warned."

He pinged Onslaught, applying a high-level command override to make sure the Combaticon leader would respond and looping both Swindle and Octane in on the conversation. //Onslaught? Cyclonus. For your information, I just caught Swindle in the middle of a plot to raid the base energon stockpile.//

//What? Oh...// Onslaught sighed. //My apologies, Commander Cyclonus. I-//

//Can I take it that you don't want your entire team to be on half rations for the next six rotations, Onslaught?//

//Certainly not, Commander. I'll see to it.// The change in Onslaught's tone said that he understood _very_ clearly what was expected of him in order to avoid that fate, and Swindle's dismayed squawk confirmed that he too was keeping up with the programme. Octane's optics were wide in what his fields suggested was mostly admiration.

// _Thank_ you. Cyclonus out.// He turned his full attention back to Swindle. "Get back to your teammates. _Now._ "

"All right, all right! Sheesh..."

Swindle scurried away a few steps before transforming and fleeing, his vehicle form bouncing over the potholed ancient road as he vanished into the distance. Cyclonus and Octane both watched him go for a moment, before Octane turned cautiously back and made an ingratiating face. "Uh, so, since I wasn't gonna help him even if you hadn't showed up, can I go too?"

For a moment he considered making Octane's life miserable as well, but the triple-changer hadn't _done_ anything, and his plea of intended innocence cross-checked with everything Cyclonus had overheard. "I congratulate you on your common sense, Octane. Get out of here."

"Right you are - uh, thanks."

Octane threw a sloppy salute, transformed to his tanker mode, and trundled urgently away in the direction of the base. Cyclonus stared after him, wondering what in the void to make of _that_ , before giving up, transforming in his turn, and heading for the _Dis_. The next person who got between him and his downtime - unless they were Galvatron, of course - was going to be very sorry indeed.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'd been originally planning to do this whole fic as Cyclonus's POV, but let's be real, Scourge deserves more attention than he gets in fandom. So for those of you wondering what he was looking so shifty about in ch3-4, read on. No porn in this chapter either, just some rather intense thinking coupled with emotional perspectives that human readers may consider less than healthy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Update note: this chapter is being uploaded at the same time as the revised Chapter 5, so please do click back and make sure you don't miss anything!]

Scourge tried not to complain, he really did.

Contrary to speculation - which he admittedly did his best to encourage - that fact had nothing to do with stoicism, bravery, or indeed an unnatural, void-forged lack of emotion. It did, however, have everything to do with having figured out very quickly that neither Galvatron nor Cyclonus had any patience with weakness, and that therefore he'd better keep anything that looked like such strictly to himself. So, carefully measured inscrutability was his public demeanour of choice, aided by concealing moustaches and the fact that in complement to his heightened senses, Unicron had given him enhanced stealth and lockdown protocols.

The pose wasn't perfect, of course. Fear was hard to hide and it was sometimes judicious not to try, given that Galvatron's wrath could often be best appeased by a suitable display of cowering. Excitement was... not an emotion he actually got to _use_ that often, but he knew he didn't always do a good job of concealing it when he did.

And then Cyclonus had thrown _this_ at him.

Watching the staticky, wavering surveillance footage, he had felt, very uncharacteristically for him, as though he didn't know where to look. Scourge knew from secrets, and he could see that for all the Battlechargers had been reckless enough to do - _that_ \- in a corridor and get caught, it _was_ still meant to be a secret. Nothing that felt as good as that had looked like it did could be anything else; letting someone see how much they could affect you was dangerous, and accidentally revealing as much to outside optics was even worse. Once someone knew what you wanted, they could always use it against you.

Given that, it wasn't for Runabout and Runamuck's sake that Scourge had found himself unexpectedly barely able to look at that clip. Getting a glimpse of their potential weaknesses was hardly going to embarrass _him_ , and if they didn't want to be caught then they should have been more careful. No, the root of his discomfiture had been Cyclonus at his side, so clearly repelled by what he was seeing even while still confused by it, thinking of nothing but security risks and disciplinary issues. There had been no space in his reaction for Scourge to offer any opinion more nuanced than agreement.

So he hadn't. He'd tightened his lockdowns and agreed to help, because in cold hard fact Cyclonus was _right_. Whatever this was, they needed more insight and a containment strategy before it got worse. Scourge flexed his fingers, reached for the virtual keyboard at his console, and set to work.

Computer hacking was one of his minor functions, subordinate to his primary role as a hunter-tracker and scout. But it was still all _data_ , it still revolved around being able to perceive and correlate information in huge quantities at lightning speeds, and he was _built_ for that. The repair bay mainframe had relatively good security protocols, and they put up just enough of a fight to be interesting. It still didn't take long, once he started trying in earnest, to slide his claws under its virtual armour and crack it open.

It was satisfying, for all it was easy. Hacker work gave his processors something to _do_ , scratched the hollow itch that was permanently left behind where he could no longer use the more exotic pieces of his sensor suite. Just as Cyclonus had to put up with a miniaturised altmode and Galvatron couldn't blow up entire planetoids any more without at least some forward planning, Scourge's sacrifice to the Decepticons' endless fuel shortages had been the deactivation of his most powerful and power- _hungry_ detector arrays. No more passive hyperlight vision to let him watch events on the other side of the quadrant in real time. No more ultraradio to listen to the stars whispering in frequencies of fire. No more casual flicking through higher-dimensional projections to see a fleeing target's probability distribution and guess where they would go before they knew they had made the decision themselves.

He could bear it. He had enough of his more mundane senses active that he felt mostly safe, and they still let him see more than anyone else in the army did. He could do enough of his original job that Galvatron was usually happy with him, which was definitely a very high priority as far as Scourge was concerned. But he still felt _empty_ , hungry in his spark as much as his fuel tanks, the world muffled around him and his systems aching for the depth and intensity of input they were built for. Prying data out of a recalcitrant mainframe running code that had apparently been assembled by at least four people, all with very idiosyncratic internal languages, was... well, not the _same_ , but it gave his understimulated CPU something to do. It helped.

Blueprints retrieved, he backed carefully out of the system, brushing away the traces of his presence as he went. He had only copied the data he wanted, not edited the originals, so nobody should suspect he had ever been there. If there was one thing Scourge flattered himself he was good at, it was getting away with things...

...well, except when he very nearly _hadn't_ gotten away with it earlier, when Cyclonus had dropped him into this mess without even the mercy of a warning and then had the brass bearings to look at him like he thought Scourge was hiding something. Which Scourge _was_ , in fairness. It was just something that he wasn't sure he wanted to confront even in his own thoughts, which meant he _definitely_ didn't want to disclose it to Cyclonus.

He had genuinely been as shocked as his wingmate by what they had seen on the surveillance records. He had shared Cyclonus's instinctive horror at the thought of exposed, routinely accessible hardlink systems, and his first thought had been relief that Unicron hadn't fitted _him_ with anything like that - _not that he'd needed it,_ Unicron had been able to run his claws through their code wirelessly from the other side of the sector when he wanted to, and Scourge had hastily kicked those tattered, corrupted half-memories back out of cache before he could give himself a day-long case of the horrors. The idea of being so vulnerable made him flinch and tuck his wings around himself and check his firewalls and armour locks again, just to be sure.

But where Cyclonus had seemed utterly unmoved by any trace of empathy for the Battlechargers, Scourge had found himself twitching in something uncomfortably, humiliatingly close to _envy_. Not of the cables, _stars and void_ no; but the rest of it, the teasing, the _touching_. Sensory stimulation that was apparently purely for the sake of it, for nothing but pleasure... _that_ thought tied his own underexercised neural nets into knots. It wasn't as though he and his wingmates never touched each other at all, hands on shoulders in passing or occasional brushes of plating if they stood close together; but they didn't touch like _that_. Not with that obvious focus on making each other _feel_ something, on providing sensation purely so the other could enjoy processing it...

Scourge bit his lip, clenched his claws into his palm. It hurt, enough to distract his mind from wandering off in directions where he knew madness lay. He stood no chance of explaining the intricacies of _that_ thought process to Cyclonus, not when he'd felt that cold, frost-bright contempt in his wingmate's fields for everything associated with this cursed idea, and there was definitely nobody else he would even consider bringing it up with. His secrets were staying his own, uncomfortable or not. Better to just killfile that entire topic and stick to using his stolen data for whatever scraps of leverage it was worth.

Though thinking of that, he was definitely going to look at those files before he handed them over. If he could learn anything from them that Cyclonus might not immediately figure out himself, he might be able to multiply that leverage at least a little.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Cyclonus finally gets some answers, only to rather wish he'd never asked. No porn in this chapter either, just some more tech headcanons and Cyclonus being squicked.

"Cyclonus? Got those files you asked me for. Ahem."

Cyclonus had thought he was alone in the quiet of the _Dis'_ observation deck, under the armourglass ceiling that displayed Charr's dusty-glittering starscape beyond, but Scourge in full stealth mode could sneak up on almost anyone. He turned - pointedly without startling - as his wingmate came up beside him and the tracker's fields brushed his in a wordless, surreptitious greeting. "Good. Where are they?"

"Not in the _Dis'_ mainframe," Scourge said, looking up conspiratorially from under his heavy superoptic ridges. "Here you are."

_Not anywhere Galvatron might stumble over them,_ in other words. "Well done, Scourge." He accepted the datapacket Scourge offered to him over their wireless comm and ran it through his neurosecurity filters, which reported that the contents were nothing more than the files they were supposed to be. "Did you have any trouble getting these?"

"Not really."

The words were accompanied by a suspiciously casual shrug of dark wings, and Cyclonus sighed. "Are you boasting or is the Constructicons' security really that bad?"

Scourge lowered his gaze with a crooked half-smile. "Heh. A little of both?"

The corners of Cyclonus's mouth twitched up in answer before he could quite stop them. "I see."

To give the tracker his due, Scourge _had_ done a comprehensive job of meeting Cyclonus's demands. The packet contained full copies of over thirty schematic sets, including nearly the entirety of the current Decepticon forces. The only gaps he immediately noticed were Soundwave and his infocons, but Cyclonus knew the odds were good that they were missing because Soundwave had never allowed them to be included in the repair bay archive to begin with. "Impressive," he murmured.

Scourge's fields flickered warm with surprise and hastily hidden pleasure at the praise. "I, ah, went over them myself already," he volunteered. "I've flagged the interesting parts. Take a look at the Seekers, it's easiest to see on them."

That wasn't entirely surprising given that Decepticon Seekers were constructed on standardised templates, whereas almost everyone currently in the army was some kind of custom build. Cyclonus flicked through to the stock Seeker blueprints and followed Scourge's trail of file markers through the layers of schematics and wiring diagrams, and...

What he found himself looking at was something far more sophisticated than he had ever imagined. The paired banks of adaptive ports and retractable cables, tucked under a couple of lockable but simple latched panels on the midsection, were one thing; the internal systems that backed onto them were another matter entirely. Dedicated capacitor banks that served no purpose other than to supply that particular hardware, with elaborate buffering and relay systems that linked them to the primary power conduits while still allowing them to be managed independently of the main charge distribution protocols. Data-ribbon cables that ran back to a processor feed that threaded down the length of the spinal struts - Cyclonus groaned quietly at that, seeing everything he'd feared. This _was_ a hardlink data-transfer system, which meant it was hackable, which meant it was _dangerous-_

-and then he followed the actual data-path back up that spinal feed, and part of it forked to the metaprocessor and databanks, but a _huge_ section diverted to the sensory processing arrays and another substantial piece went to the emotional regulation module. That was about as deeply integrated as any peripheral system could be without being wired right to the _spark_ , though thankfully that was the one place this aberration _didn't_ seem to be plugged into. "Stars and _void_."

"That was more or less what I said."

"The others are the same?"

"Close enough. Some are more complex than others, but the basics are standard. The sensory and charge connections are always there. A few don't have the metaprocessor hookup - Breakdown doesn't, for one. Come to think of it, the Stunticons all have fairly basic versions."

"Didn't Megatron build them? Perhaps he didn't think this... equipment was a priority." Cyclonus frowned.

"Megatron's specs are _in_ there," Scourge said. "You should see the cable shielding on _his_ hardware. The power he could've put through there..." His voice trailed off.

Cyclonus blinked and growled. "Why by the dark above does anyone still have copies of _Megatron's_ blueprints? Delete those from the mainframe, if you can get in again to do it."

"I can," Scourge confirmed, "but probably not without the Constructicons figuring out it was me."

"If they do and they make any trouble about it, send them to me," Cyclonus said, letting the snarl in his thoughts slide into his voice and feeling a hot little stab of satisfaction when Scourge visibly twitched his wings downward and ducked slightly. Not that intimidating Scourge was all that difficult, but it was still gratifying. "We've got enough problems without traitors."

Scourge nodded hastily. "Absolutely."

"Such as the fact that the entire army is riddled with _this_." Cyclonus sighed, frustration resurfacing past every other emotion. "And apparently they're all bent on _using_ it..."

"About that," Scourge began, fidgeting slightly. Metal whispered on metal as the sharp edges of his armour scuffed together.

" _What,_ Scourge?"

"I, ah, tried to search on some of the component terminology from the blueprints. Turned out I had some interesting data in my protocol archives, but it had all been de-indexed. Try 'elective interfacing' as a search string and see what you get."

"Elective interfacing?" Cyclonus repeated. "All right..." He ran the query through his own databanks, setting it to search regardless of index status, and...

The data _was_ there. But, like Scourge's files, it had been marked up in such a way that he would never have realised he had it except by knowing how to look for it. _Voluntary data exchange... charge transfer... deliberate capacitor overload... sensory executables... cross-routing to pleasure circuitry..._

Optics widening, he scrolled through the secondary files that related cultural associations and social protocols to the physical practice. _Intimacy and social bonding... Autobot versus Decepticon perceptions... barter and monetisation... unlawful misuse... artistic representation..._

" _...what?!_ "

"Oh, you _do_ have it too."

"De-indexed, like yours, but yes." Cyclonus looked at his wingmate, stunned. "No wonder Runabout and Runamuck expected me to understand what they were doing. Every mech ever forged would have known."

"Every mech ever forged _on Cybertron,_ " Scourge said, lowering his voice. His optics were wide, something like fear quivering in his fields. " _He_ didn't want us to have this. That's what it is."

"I can see why not," Cyclonus said, ruthlessly stamping on his spark's attempt to echo Scourge's superstitious terror at the thought of their creator. "This starts to make sense. Presumably we have the data in case we ever ran into a situation like this, but de-indexed so we couldn't find it purely by accident... because it better suited his purposes that we never know about this at all."

"Because it would make us susceptible," Scourge said, slowly. "Just like you said from the start. He wanted us to be - well, you _know_."

Cyclonus nodded. "Perfect weapons. Immune to distraction, impossible to suborn or sabotage. So it seems he hid the information and deleted the hardware, and presumably also whatever code should go with it..."

"Because giving us this would've meant giving us a weakness-"

"Because it would have made us _like them,_ " Cyclonus breathed, his optics widening with sudden revelation. " _Too_ like them. This is part of the social order for Cybertronians..."

"...and we're _not Cybertronian,_ " Scourge finished. "So he didn't let us have it."

Silence fell. Scourge unobtrusively edged a little closer to Cyclonus, and Cyclonus didn't pull away from him. The dark of space above their heads felt vast, hollow with hunger and flecked with distant light. However much they shared a badge and a base with the last of the Decepticons, they were still something _else_ , and all of a sudden their awareness of that fact felt too vivid to be comfortably borne.

"Do you _mind_ not having it?" Scourge ventured, cautiously.

"Going by all this data? Really not," Cyclonus said, with distaste. "As you said yourself, it's a weakness. We're better off without it."

Scourge looked less immediately reassured by that than Cyclonus would have expected of him. "I suppose..."

" _Scourge._ "

The tracker's gaze slid towards his, and then uncomfortably away again. "What? Nothing."

Cyclonus sighed, and decided to let it go.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I can tell I'm seriously making my Cyclonus muse squirm by this point, because this chapter has been fighting me tooth and nail for the last two weeks straight. Still no porn, or at least only emotional porn.

Except that, several hours later and off duty, he found he _couldn't_ let it go.

It was quiet and dark in the _Dis'_ recharge room. Cyclonus was alone, undisturbed, lying comfortably among the recharge floor's padding blocks and protected by several thicknesses of insulating blankets. Starlight glimmered tranquil beyond the armourglass ceiling overhead. It should have been easy to settle into recharge in such familiar, restful surroundings.

Instead, when he first lay down he had started trying - logically as he had thought, perhaps foolishly with hindsight - to sort through the de-indexed files he'd found thanks to Scourge's tipoff. It was normal for Cybertronians to come online with archives of factual and cultural information pre-installed in their databanks, granting new sparks a quick and painless integration into the society around them. Unicron had done the same for his creations, compiling what he considered appropriate resource libraries for them; presumably, as with everything else he had given them, with the aim of making them more effective in his service. Cyclonus was aware that he knew a great deal that he had never consciously learned, but accessing such preloaded information was so instinctive that he had never thought twice about it.

Discovering that there were files in those libraries that had been actively _hidden_ from him was disconcerting - though still not as disconcerting as the files themselves. Maybe it made sense to those who had the relevant hardware and coding-imperatives, but he, without them, struggled to understand what enticed the majority of Cybertronians to engage in this... _interfacing_. The documentation was honest enough about the dangers involved. From scrapcode and deliberate hacking to physical injuries - to emotional damage so severe that mechs had killed, betrayed, even gone to war over it - there were many risks. And as for the rewards... while there was much made of interfacing as a pleasurable form of contact and communication among close companions, there were also plenty of scenarios described that seemed nothing more than brief acts of sensory indulgence or even outright transactions.

Sometimes between mechs who didn't even like each other, which was the most alarming twist of all. Not that Cyclonus had any idea how the experience might feel when filtered through that pleasure-focused wiring he'd seen in the Decepticons' blueprints, but the thought made his targeting arrays twitch and his armour's seams clamp defensively tight. It was disturbing to contemplate a system that could override self-preservation enough to make such a connection with an untrusted stranger or an outright enemy seem worth risking, let alone actively desirable, and he could almost summon up a thought of gratitude toward his creator. Whatever else Unicron had done, at least he hadn't put _that_ flaw in their systems to be exploited.

Though that was unsurprising, since to do so would have run counter to the Devourer's purposes. With interfacing hardware and hookups, they would have been vulnerable to all the abuses so vividly detailed in the files, yes; but they would also have had more in common with Primus' creations, and that might have been a greater failing still in Unicron's estimation. He looked back at the overview document that summarised the essentials of the practice. _Theoscientific consensus has long held that Primus devised the function of interfacing as a means to strengthen social and personal bonds between His creations, intended to enhance their capacities for affection, empathy and altruism..._

All traits that Unicron had desired his elite strikeforce to lack. He had created them to destroy without mercy, to regard their light-forged cousins as nothing more than scrap metal in waiting; and so he had stripped the interfacing protocols from their designs in favour of giving them their own unique software and hardware, compatible only with one another. Connecting them not for any whim of sentiment or pleasure, but for their single forged purpose of bringing ruin and death upon the galaxy...

Cyclonus shivered at that thought, conflicted. His fragmented memories of his service to Unicron were the stuff of horror in so many ways, but not _all_ ways. Systems functioning at full capacity, fuel tanks that didn't constantly remind him of their depletion, the effortless ease with which all three of them had wielded the borrowed power of a god. And always the connection between them, touching thoughts with his wingmates in the _Dis'_ command datascape or enslaved to the ecstasy of battle under Galvatron's hands... even now, there were times he felt his spark might escape its containment and fly to Galvatron, like a mech-hawk to its master's wrist, when his lord glanced at him _just so_ from optics hot with possessive fire. Receiving that look felt like an unspoken promise that he would always be kept to serve, always be _needed_.

That despite being stripped of his core function as Galvatron's personal fightercraft and bodyguard, of nine-tenths of his strength and what felt like half his spark, Galvatron still valued what was left of him.

He ached at that thought with a devotion that he only wished he had better ways to express. _I will always be yours, my lord, I would do anything you asked of me..._ Though he wondered, with a pang of shame, just what he was imagining that Galvatron _might_ ask of him. He was perfectly familiar with the revised parameters of his duty since Unicron's fall: from his battlefield role as Galvatron's close-support and overwatch, to his many additional functions as Air Commander, interrogator, tactician, co-pilot of the _Dis_ , acting-quartermaster of the army, and Galvatron's general representative and spokesmech. He knew that he was useful, because he dedicated himself to being so. He could gauge his own worth by the extent of Galvatron's casual reliance on him, and the proper measure of reward for all his service was what he already received. To be kept in his lord's confidence, to be given the most demanding of tasks because he had proven his ability, perhaps now and then to be graced with a casually-tossed scrap of praise or one of Galvatron's fierce-keen smiles.

Things were as they were. Cyclonus had accepted as much ever since Galvatron's disappearance and return, acknowledging that the changes in all of them were irrevocable. There was no reason to imagine that his lord might suddenly demand some new and exotic proof of allegiance from him _now_... and yet in the very moment he told himself that, his temperature gauges flashed an unexpected amber. Startled, he willed his suddenly quickened engines to spin down. A sensation stirred up the length of his spinal strut that made him arch his back and let slip a small, hastily-stifled gasp.

It was unfamiliar, but it was _insistent_. Something as pernicious as hunger, prompting a physical reaction equally as intense and yet as indescribable. Hunger for him wasn't simply a gauge pointing to _empty_ , but a cascade ache of warnings from engines and guns and autorepairs and heat exchangers, the pain of vapour-locks in draining fuel lines, a roughness in his throat and a needling sensation in his dentae that made him itch to bite down on anything that might have energon in it. He never gave in to that impulse, too aware of where it came from and where it would lead him; though he knew that Scourge, too, experienced something similar, his claws prickling when his tanks got too low like a dark, perverted hint. What else could they expect, creations of the Devourer?

But this... _wasn't_ that, and yet it felt like a close relation of it. An ache that slipped and fluttered through his sensornets, tugging at his awareness but impossible to pin down with his diagnostics; a tension in his cables and servomotors that seemed to beg for resistance, as though they longed for some external strength to test themselves against. He shifted position, abruptly restless, the pressure of the padding beneath him turned inexplicably uncomfortable. His core temperature was still too high and he tossed aside the thermal blankets with a rough, frustrated gesture.

He deliberately cleared all his caches and ran through a full boot cycle. The smooth rhythm of it, the familiar dip-and-rise below the threshold of consciousness and then up again through a silvery cascade of automated, dispassionate notifications, was soothing... for all of a minute, before his thoughts caught on precisely the same track as before as his processors found the unresolved threads again. He couldn't stop thinking about that look of lingering uncertainty he'd seen from Scourge, or about the empty ache between his shoulders where his cockpit and pilot systems rested miniaturised and untouched.

What was it Scourge had wanted, when he had hesitated to agree with Cyclonus about what should have been a foregone conclusion?

What was it _he_ wanted, that was making Galvatron's face and voice and the echo of his touch haunt his imaging circuitry and refuse to be dismissed? Loyalty was one thing, devotion was another, but neither of them until now had ever kept him from _sleeping_.

It was quickly becoming intolerable, not to mention bitterly ironic. He'd set out to resolve a disciplinary issue and now _he_ was the one whose discipline had apparently uninstalled itself without his authorisation. With a muttered curse, he sat up, climbed off the recharge floor and stalked from the room. If he couldn't recharge in peace, he'd try an alternative.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which feelings make life complicated, and Scourge once again gets away without having to do anything about it. (Still no porn. I promise I am getting to it.)

Scourge was fairly sure he shouldn't have said anything, or at least, that he shouldn't have said _that_.

His guard had slipped, that was all. Slipped the way it did dangerously often around Cyclonus, not least because when it was just the two of them, Cyclonus would sometimes let _his_ guard slip in turn and show more emotion to Scourge than he did to anyone save Galvatron. A glimpse here or there of uncertainty or weariness that he would have steel-shuttered away from anyone else; an occasional quiet laugh or a rapier-quick riposte to Scourge's tentative attempts at bantering with him. Little flashes of chemistry, of _contact_ , that made Scourge feel as though he maybe had something at least halfway to a friend.

Scourge _liked_ that. Liked it enough to risk lowering his own defences in answer, trying to coax his wingmate to keep doing the same. He wouldn't have gone so far as to say he had a long-term strategy, or even any real idea of what would qualify as success. He just knew that Cyclonus's half-hidden smiles and dry teasing felt like energon candy to the knot of nameless hunger beneath his lasercore shielding, and so the closest thing he had to a plan was _that's good, try to get more of it._

He had thought it was going well, or at least not actively badly. Now, though, he had an uncomfortable feeling he was back where he'd started and he was just hoping he wasn't even further back than that. At least he could console himself that he actually _had_ said something stupid, which meant that Cyclonus's annoyance was justified, which was better than the alternative.

He cast a wistful glance up in the direction of the _Dis_ , telling himself he was just running a routine check on his wing's whereabouts. Galvatron was in the repair bay, his energy signature hazy around its edges with the distinctive interference caused by a large quantity of extremely hot oil. Not a surprise; ever since Thrull, Galvatron had been routinely spending hours at a time in the maintenance baths. He probably wouldn't be going anywhere until the next watch change.

And Cyclonus was in the recharge room, where he ought to be at this time of the cycle - no, wait. His transponder was moving. Scourge turned a few additional sensors in that direction, and watched his wingmate leave the recharge room, head to the nearest flight bay, transform and dive toward Charr's surface.

He was heading for the rock range. Scourge watched him go, wondering what was on his mind, trying to convince himself it was none of his business... who was he fooling. He was the Tracker, _everything_ was his business if he decided it was. He carried on watching.

The rock range was a more than usually broken-down few square kilometres of Charr's ruins, its cratered roads and shells of buildings scattered with boulders and large pieces of debris. Painted all through the wreckage were dozens of Autobot symbols, ranging from offensively large to infuriatingly tiny and well hidden. Anyone off duty was free to go and shoot at the "Autobot positions" any time they wished, whether for practice, weapon calibration or simple stress relief. Whenever the range was looking too demolished the rocks would be repainted and rearranged, usually by whoever had most recently torqued Cyclonus off enough to earn an afternoon of punishment detail.

However, the restorers did get to choose where the new "enemies" were placed and how challenging they were to shoot. The only requirement was that all the painted targets be marked with electroactive gel-cel stickers that could be detected by targeting systems and emitted a tiny but distinctive burst of energy when hit, allowing for automatic scorekeeping that didn't rely on anyone's word of honour. The stickers also made it possible to run the rock range using only minimum weapon settings, playing a kind of lightweight laser tag that popped the gel-cels but left the buildings and rocks intact for reuse. And, more importantly, saved fuel.

But that wasn't always satisfying, and Cyclonus... well, Cyclonus this time was taking out the painted badges like each and every one had a real Autobot attached to it and all of them owed him money. Even in Charr's attenuated atmosphere, Scourge could clearly see the hammer-strike shockwaves of incendiary bombs. Laser bolts melted rock or superheated it until it exploded, sending blizzards of tiny, vicious splinters ricocheting into the air.

Cyclonus flew through them without ever flinching. Light flashed in his turbine intakes as laser filter grids vaporised the spinning shards before they could damage his engines. Walls crashed down in his wake and never brushed his tailfins. Efficient, merciless, every detail of destruction accounted for and every weakness systematically reinforced... that was Cyclonus, Scourge thought, with a tug of wistful envy. The two of them were differently coded so a direct comparison was never going to be wholly fair, but Scourge still wished he had even half of Cyclonus's singleminded strength. It must be nice to be that sure of yourself.

He hesitated. Technically he was currently overseeing the base, but _nothing was happening_. He hadn't spoken to anyone or seen anything that needed his attention since his watch had started. Giving in to temptation, he left the control room, made his way to the nearest open rooftop, transformed and headed for the rock range.

It was a short flight, and before he was halfway there he could feel the air shaking. The bass pulse of explosions and the singing snap of laser fire confirmed that Cyclonus was still busy, and Scourge approached cautiously and with his transponder switched on. He didn't know what had set Cyclonus off on this quest for the top of the rock range leaderboard, but he didn't want to be mistaken for bonus points.

To his relief, as he came into close-radio range he received a distracted ping from his wingmate: _acknowledgement/busy_. Cyclonus was preoccupied, but apparently not torqued off at him in particular. _Understood/not urgent_ , Scourge pinged back, then transformed and perched on a rooftop overlooking the range to watch.

It was well worth watching. Cyclonus in combat was beautiful the way a mastercrafted blade was beautiful, everything in him focused to one edge, one function, one purpose. The whining roar of his engines hammered against Scourge's sensors, sound and vibration and physical impact all at once. His stealth paint was a shattered galaxy of reflected glints from Charr's pale starlight, the brightest things on him the incinerating-hot glow of his thrusters and the muzzle flashes from his guns. Somehow he even held a perfect nose-down stall to pour fire into the gap between two high walls without falling out of the air, and Scourge saw a gel-cel tucked deep in the crevasse flash plaintively bright in defeat.

And then Cyclonus pulled up, slowing enough to transform, and came to join him. "Scourge," he remarked as he touched down on the rooftop. "What are you doing here?"

"Watching you fly," Scourge said. "Might learn something. How did you do?"

"Four hundred and eighty-six thousand," Cyclonus said dismissively, as though that wasn't nearly double the record for the current layout. "And true, you might." He moved closer to Scourge and propped his hip on a broken cupola, leaning there with thoughtless grace.

Scourge looked up at him, at his sharp wings and the high crests of his helm gleaming-edged against the stars, at the contemplative glow of his narrowed optics. He didn't ask the obvious question of _why were you doing this,_ because he didn't want to know whether it was somehow his fault that Cyclonus was shooting things instead of recharging. Instead, he reached into one of his more secure pocket-folds and - not without a pang of miserly hesitation - pulled forth a small but bright-glowing energon cube.

"Here," he offered, holding it out. If Cyclonus was skipping recharge, let alone doing so to run combat drills, he almost certainly needed a top-up.

Cyclonus gave him a level look. "Where did you get that from?" he asked, in distinctly loaded tones.

"Nowhere that's going to mess up your rationing scripts."

"Hmh." Cyclonus's mouth twitched in the ghost of a smile, and he reached over and took the cube. Their fingertips brushed together, just for a moment.

"You're welcome," Scourge said, raising his superoptic ridges.

He didn't push his luck any further, watching instead as Cyclonus drank pensively from the cube with much more self-control than Scourge would have been able to muster himself. That fuel had been stolen from the pockets of an Autobot he had shot down a few battles ago, and it was significantly better than most of what was in the base stockpile.

He wouldn't have quite said he was trying to buy his way back into Cyclonus's favour, but surely it couldn't _hurt_.

Cyclonus leaned back to drain the last of the energon and then pressed his fingers together, flicking the empty cube out of existence in a tiny starburst of collapsing magnetic fields. He didn't turn his attention back to Scourge, instead looking up at Charr's darkened sky, but his aura wasn't fully locked down and its edges brushed lightly against Scourge's armour.

The contact didn't give away much of Cyclonus's mood, but it was at least untarnished by anger or contempt. Relieved, Scourge carefully let his own fields mesh with his wingmate's, offering a muted answering touch.

The warrior still didn't look around; but he didn't object, either. Scourge shifted his perceptual focus, temporarily backgrounding all his other senses in favour of that sliver of electromagnetic intimacy. Auras were intricately complex, layered fields made up of the sum and average of the thousands of minute disruptions generated by the flow of current through circuits and the vibrations of mechanical components. Translated through sensory processing, they were experienced as tactile and pseudo-visual input, keyed with emotional context derived from the manifold ways in which a mech's mood consciously and unconsciously affected the operation of their frame.

Cyclonus, heavily shielded by his armour and quick to guard his thoughts, was good at limiting what he gave away. But the base note of his aura was always a sensation like the brush of steelsilk, cool and elegant and silvery as moonlight reflecting in a burnished blade. _Discipline, strength,_ and a cold warning edge of _danger_ to remind the unwary that he was a weapon, _Galvatron's weapon,_ and he should never be trusted to show mercy...

...though Scourge wasn't sure he _cared_ about mercy as long as Cyclonus was showing him _something_. His own aura was all textured shadows, reflecting the secrecy he was built for, and his dermal sensor layers were full of pickups that let him use his fields as an active perceptual device. He could analyse another mech's inner workings and status from the ways in which their aura interfered with his, in far more depth than standard electrosense allowed. Unless someone knew how to lock down or consciously lie with their fields, Scourge could tell in detail how they were functioning, what they were feeling, and more besides without even touching them.

Of course, Cyclonus knew he could do that, and was perceptive enough himself to notice it if Scourge tried too hard to read him. So Scourge didn't try, and instead simply focused on the pure physical experience of Cyclonus's aura meshing with his. Little smoothly-mingling ripples of Cyclonus's silver and his own shadows lapped back against his sensors, intensified now by the strengthening of Cyclonus's fields as his systems processed the extra fuel Scourge had given him.

It was worth having sacrificed a cube of even black-market-grade energon for. He stayed where he was, quiet, watching; recording to permanent memory the image of his wingmate standing idle for once with his gaze on the stars, the sensation of soft, unguarded silver brushing over his armour. He wasn't going to speak, he wasn't going to ask for anything, he was just going to take every bit of this while he could-

And a sudden flicker of tension snapped through Cyclonus's fields. "Scourge?"

He was just sitting here barely ticking over, what had he done _now?_ "What?"

Cyclonus pinged a vector to him. "Is there something up there?"

-oh. He scrambled to swap his input priorities and looked up. His ranged-sight reached out, to the top of Charr's thin atmosphere, past the asteroid belt and the nameless rock-worlds beyond it...

...there. A shimmer, a distortion in space: dark shapes gliding on the liquid wings of cloaking shields, with only the subtle twisting of the stars to betray them. "How did _you_ see _that?_ " Scourge blurted out. "Ships - five, no, six of them."

His scanners dug deeper, bypassing the cloaks; resolving wide-winged warships with hooked prows, alien banners painted along their hulls, the tiny blurred shapes of the crews- "You remember those fuzzy organics on that mining base we raided for isodrite a while ago? I think they've followed us home."

"Hostile, then," Cyclonus said. He tensed, his engines spinning up with a low whine.

"I'll say, they're deploying orbital laser arrays." // _Galvatron!_ We're under attack!//

// _WHAT?!_ //

//Decepticons!// Cyclonus's voice rang across the tacnet broadcast channel. // _Scramble!_ // He turned back to Scourge, optics blazing. "You can see them. Get on the tacnet and give us a targeting feed!"

"Doing it." Scourge was already configuring a stream to send real-time enemy position markers to every Decepticon in range. In the back of his consciousness he was aware of the bright streaks of flyers launching into the air, of the great void-violet blade of the _Dis_ coming about in orbit and powering up its guns. The Sweeps were squeaking at him for orders and everything was suddenly happening at once, but this was only a battle. However unexpected, he knew how to handle that.

And as long as they were in battle together, he didn't have to wonder where he stood with Cyclonus, because the answer was "on the same side". He'd take it.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Galvatron finally shows up in this fic. Warnings for sci-fi combat scenes, glorification of violence, and references to past physical and emotional trauma. Still no porn yet ~~unless you're as turned on by space battles as Galvatron is.~~

The uses of a repair bay's hot-oil bath included lubricating and unseizing moving parts, removing contaminants, and supporting heat retention in mechs who had suffered cryo-damage or core engine failure. There were well documented protocols for all of those various functions: optimal temperatures and timeframes, additional therapeutic interventions recommended to increase their effectiveness, and so on.

Turning up the thermostat to a bare two degrees below the flashpoint of the heavy mineral oil and then immersing oneself in the simmering depths for hours at a stretch was definitely not a standard procedure, but _standard_ was a word no-one would apply to Galvatron. Sitting in the deepest central pit of the bath, only the points of his crown and tailsight breaking the oil's slowly roiling surface, the erstwhile Herald of Unicron curled himself up with his armour's seams cracked wide, and _soaked_.

It was only a pale shadow of his memories of the plasma pits. Plasma flowed and penetrated in ways that even the finest oil didn't, and the mundane heat of the bath was nothing to the near-magical experience of being immersed in what amounted to pure molten charge. Still, the warmth lightened the load on his engines and the sensation of microbubbles tingling against his internal sensors was pleasingly luxurious, so he indulged himself nonetheless.

He knew he had been unfathomably lucky with Thrull. Of all the places he could have found himself after his catastrophic fall - the galaxy was full of black holes and warp vortices, of cold dead rocks and stars whose hearts would have swallowed him forever, not to mention all the inhabited worlds whose denizens would have been eager to consummate his destruction! - he had somehow been fortunate enough to land in the perfect sanctuary. Brutalised by his own creator, crushed between the colliding fists of gods at war, he had been cast broken into the void... and the inscrutable forces of the cosmos had reached out a hand and caught him.

It was hard not to see destiny at work in that. His destabilised spark and shattered frame had needed power in unthinkable quantities - Thrull's molten heart and the exotic plasma pools on its surface had given him enough and _more_. He had been barely conscious when he crashed, lost to the unique agonies of a cascade neural collapse, but his self-repair systems had known what they were doing. They had recognised the power they required and taken it, and he had healed; and then he had been whole, and there was still power to spare, and his auto-upgrade capabilities had seized upon it in their turn and _kept going_.

A plasma-based weapon mode that improved upon the purely electrical one Unicron had first given him. Overclocked processors, faster than ever; enhanced engines, reinforced armour. Even his damaged spark had healed with that all-pervading energy bound into it, leaving glowing cracks in his lasercore and glittering faultlines running through his fields. Thrull had reforged him stronger, _better,_ incomparably unique: wild and scarred and _perfect_ , and utterly enamoured of what he had become.

And as he had lain there in the depths, as the pain of healing had slowly transformed into the glory of _becoming_ , he had dreamed. He had dreamed the dream of empire, the inevitable legacy of the Decepticon code that underwrote his own; but unlike his ill-fated predecessor, he had received that dream without the burden of tedious politics or the cloying memories of a faded past. _He_ had dreamed of true destruction, of guttering sparks strewn like confetti before his feet, of worlds torn asunder in a wake of fire. In the secret depths of his spark, Galvatron had stretched out his hand and the galaxy had _burned_.

Reality, when he was rudely restored to it, had been something of a disappointment. To surface from his dreams of endless war and find himself in a galaxy still offensively unconquered, with nothing to his name but one ship, a handful of mostly useless troops and a derelict throneworld that had already burned long before he got his hands on it... all of that had required some adjustment of his expectations. Fortunately, his newly enhanced cognitive circuits made him nothing if not adaptable. Once his frustration had ebbed and his memories had recompiled, he had acknowledged - at least to himself - that it was, after all, better to be awake in a world that still held challenges than to wield purely imagined power in an endless dream. Dreams might make a good template for destiny, but they could never be the fulfilment of it.

And it had been good to reclaim what was rightfully _his_ , what was left of Unicron's gifts to him. His great warship, diminished by the death of its creator and power source, but still the most terrifying thing in this sector's skies. His wingmates-! Cyclonus, his devoted lieutenant, whose gaze faithfully reflected the god of war he knew himself to be; Scourge, sly and secretive, afraid of him and yet still seeking to please. They, like him, had adapted to the new order of things, but they were still _his_ , and he thought of them now with a sweet, covetous pride.

The lesser Decepticons, his inherited army, didn't understand. They were used to Megatron's way, to treachery and opportunism; they took loyalty for sycophancy and discipline for lack of ambition. He had realised very quickly that it wouldn't pay to put his faith in any of them. And then there were the Autobots, the Quintessons, so many obstacles still to be removed from his path to ultimate victory...!

It was exasperating. And yet in the day-to-day chaos of managing his realm and leading his mess of an army, he had discovered an odd kind of exhilaration. Chaos itself was a form of freedom, after all. The constant need to improvise and make do was as much fun as it was frustrating, a chance to show the galaxy what he was capable of even with the odds rigged against him. He had a worthy nemesis in the Autobots' young leader, the one who had stolen the Matrix from him and used it to break Unicron's grip on this plane of existence; Rodimus's reckless style of command was pleasingly similar to his own, satisfying to match his wits against. Assuredly he was owed revenge for what the Prime had done to him, but that didn't mean he couldn't enjoy their rivalry in the meantime.

Yes - despite the recurring setbacks, despite the fuel shortages and the occasional embarrassing defeats and the dependable ineptitude of most of his forces, the Decepticons' overall trajectory was an ascending one and Galvatron was pleased. _Tomorrow the universe,_ he mused, and basking in the comfort of a hot bath aboard his own flagship, it felt like the truth-

// _Galvatron!_ We're under attack!//

// _WHAT???_ //

So much for his good mood. He erupted from the bath, dripping with oil that smoked from his armour in a sticky haze as his engines roared to life and their heat scorched through his plating. //Scourge, tac feed, _now!_ _Dis,_ online, what in the void is going on?!//

~~ _acknowledged, warmaster_ ~~ The _Dis'_ shadowy presence was a touchstone in his thoughts, cool and unruffled in sharp contrast to Scourge's panic. ~~ _initialising torpedo batteries. moleculon missile arrays live, minimal capacity. main engines online, powering lasers, shields operational at forty-one point six percent_ ~~ A momentary pause. ~~ _six hostile vessels, capital class, cloaked, armed. engage?_ ~~

"Confirm engage! Make them regret being forged!" He launched himself into flight as he left the repair bay, the quicker to cut through the _Dis'_ corridors. The ship's AI was no mean combatant even without his help, but once he was on the bridge with a full view of the battle and his hands on the controls-!

//Tac feed ready, Galvatron! Here!//

Light pinged in the corner of his visual field, a connection-invitation from Scourge; he grabbed for it and got his first proper look at the situation, Charr's familiar terrain sketched in quick-render wireframe with the wavering icons of alien ships floating high overhead. The bridge doors slid open for him and he threw himself into his command chair, reaching for the helm controls.

Beyond the great forward window, Charr's orbital space was alive. Decepticons rose on contrails of pale flame, laser blasts scything across the dark. At the top of the atmosphere he could see light rippling like liquid where the Sweeps' fire dissipated over the enemy vessels' cloaking shields, betraying their positions; as he sank his awareness into the _Dis'_ command interface, that shimmering light was overlaid on his optical display with Scourge's streamed targeting data, the would-be attackers popping into synthesised visibility as if by magic. He took a swift measure of the aliens' strategy: no small craft, only capital ships armed with heavy plasma cannons that fired in synchronised rhythm through microsecond-precise openings in the cloaking shields, accompanied by defensive laser batteries to pick off smaller enemies who ventured too close...

Enemies like the Decepticons, caught short with only one capital ship and a handful of space-capable fighters, and next to no ground-to-orbit defences unless you counted Onslaught in his altmode. Galvatron recognised the tactical situation for the disaster it was, and cursed fluently.

Well, never mind; bad odds only meant greater glory! His frame was half forgotten in his seat as his mind and spark soared with his ship, the _Dis'_ sensory feeds and combat dataflows merging with his. Violet fire stabbed from the prow cannons at his command and added to the cascade of light pouring over the enemy shields - not _enough,_ not breaking through, _damn_ the hunger he could feel in the warship's dangerously empty tanks-

Still, he must have drawn their attention, as a new form of answering fire bloomed from behind the shields. A dozen apparently sourceless silver beams spun like a wheel of blades, and where they converged, a vast column of blinding light lanced out across the void. A centripetal laser array: exotic technology, too big to mount on a single ship, almost a miniature battle station in its own right. It was beautiful to see in action, and the sudden spike of energy readings across the monitors in front of him spoke eloquently of its power.

Nonetheless, Galvatron's admiration of its destructive elegance was severely tarnished by how close that beam had passed to the _Dis'_ port nacelle. //Sweeps! Take out that bombardment laser, _now!_ //

//Yes, Galvatron!//

Sweep Three, voice squeakier than ever with what Galvatron chose to assume was excitement rather than fear. Not that he had time to care that much either way - he was already lining up a torpedo flight to target the support ship for the laser array, hand braced over the fire control as crosshairs stuttered on the ranging monitor-

A second silver bolt punched across the void before him, missing the _Dis_ by a wide margin. For an astrosecond he was about to gloat at the gunners' poor aim, and then he saw the huge, splintering cloud of dust and rock shards that bloomed on Charr's derelict surface far below.

" _Whaaaat?!_ "

The enemy clearly didn't know that most of Charr was abandoned. That shot had hit nothing but the ruins of an ancient residential district, demolishing homes whose nameless owners had long since preceded them into oblivion. Still, rage scalded Galvatron's spark at the sight. Charr was _his_ , his gift from his lieutenants who had chosen it in his name. He was _not_ going to countenance some presumptuous alien taskforce using it for target practice!

He should have had Cybertron. He should have had an _empire_. But what he _had_ was this burned-out world with its ancient ghosts, and he would set his back against its darkened skies and drive his enemies into the abyss! The crosshairs turned green, his finger stabbed down, and the deep _thud_ of torpedoes leaving their launch tubes echoed back to him through the command interface. Miniature violet stars arced across the chaos of the battlefield in precise formation, expanding into rolling clouds of silent fire as they collided with the aliens' shields.

The shields didn't fall but they faltered, and the reality of the enemy ships briefly strobed into view beneath Scourge's projected images of them. They were sleek and grey and scarred, green lights striped along their flanks; they looked void-worn and capable, the marks of hard-earned combat experience scratched into their armour.

Galvatron bared his dentae, pleased at the sight. Furious as he was at their assault on his world, there was satisfaction in the thought that at least these were worthy enemies! He activated the _Dis'_ comms, unencrypted and multi-frequency, hailing them on the offchance they were listening. //Welcome to the Decepticon Empire! You leave in pieces!//

Laughter and taunts echoed back on the Decepticon channels, his troops appreciating the sentiment even if the enemy didn't. //All hail Galvatron!// one of the Sweeps yelled excitedly.

Galvatron laughed out loud. Exhilaration prickling hot beneath his armour, he gleefully punched another flight of torpedoes out toward the cloaked ships and watched their shields crackle and fold beneath the crash of exploding stars. The power of ultimate destruction let loose at his fingertips, his followers screaming his name even as they flung themselves into battle to kill or die at his command... _nothing, nothing in the galaxy felt better than this-!_

The silver wheel-laser got one more shot off, blasting another crater into the face of Charr, before a pair of Sweeps managed to pour enough fire through the hole Galvatron had punched in the cloaking shields to blow it up. He had a brief glimpse of the centripetal assembly, all long spars and gleaming metal, as it exploded in a fireball that bloomed like a crystanthemum and collapsed in on itself in a burst of debris. Elegant, complex, gone in a sparkpulse. It was satisfying to watch it die.

Not as satisfying, however, as pouring fire from the _Dis'_ twin-linked cannons through the debris field where it had been, stitching bursts of flame along the flank of the enemy support ship. It retaliated, plasma bolts splashing on the _Dis'_ weakened shields and scorching the forward hull plating beneath. The command interface relayed his ship's injury to him as a fiery lick of pain, and Galvatron snarled.

And then startled up in his seat, fist clenched in fierce delight, as a twilight-blue thunderbolt rocketed across the heart of the battle. Blade-sharp wings flicked to twist and roll untouched through a rain of fire, as the first and last of Galvatron's heavy cavalry charged single-handed, racing for the breach made by the _Dis'_ artillery with his guns blazing white-hot against the dark-

" _Cyclonus!_ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the cliffhanger, but a) I wanted to change POV here and b) this chapter was getting too long. Hopefully it won't take me as long to get through the next chapter as it did this one... thankyou for your patience if you've made it this far!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Battle of Who Are These Alien Bastards Anyway, part the second. Still no porn ~~but it should only be a couple more chapters now oh my GODS boys get on with it...~~ Warnings: canon-typical violence, minor combat injury, implied NPC deaths.

Cyclonus was furious with himself.

His anger drove him on, white-hot in his cerebrocircuitry, vented in the twin nuclear firetrails that streamed in his wake. There were no excuses for going into a battle, _into the defence of their own world_ no less, tired and underfuelled and distracted when all of those things were _entirely his own fault._ The awareness that he would have been in even worse shape if not for Scourge's black-market energon stash and still unexplained generosity was only an additional twist of the blade. Damn the Battlechargers, damn Octane and Swindle, damn Primus for a forgemaster of fools and damn _him_ , for justifying so very clearly why Unicron hadn't wanted them to think about any of this in the first place. This once if never again, he should have accepted his creator's will without further question.

He wished as never before for Galvatron's touch on his controls, not at all sure he could trust his own judgement in this state of mind. But for this battle it was the _Dis_ that had the privilege of receiving direct command, and Cyclonus couldn't argue with Galvatron's decision in that. Against this class of adversary the _Dis'_ heavy artillery took priority above all else. Instead, Cyclonus looped himself in to the Sweeps' tac channel on the radio, slotting into their battle formation and looking for where he could be the most use.

He felt the lack of his Armada almost as keenly as he missed the weight of Galvatron's hands. Their original battle-doctrine had been structured around paired light and heavy void cavalry: the Sweeps as fast outriders for flanking and pursuit, the Armada for pitched battle and assault, and Galvatron with the _Dis_ at the centre of the line to serve as command platform and superheavy artillery in one. The Sweeps weren't built to fling themselves into the teeth of massed fire, they weren't armed or armoured to fly strafing runs on capital ships. That was the Armada's role - and it burned Cyclonus's spark to see Scourge forced to throw his drones in and risk them where they didn't belong, because _he_ didn't have his own forces to send in their place.

Which wasn't to say that the Sweeps weren't acquitting themselves creditably. The sentience they had developed since being freed of Unicron's control seemed to have given them an improved capacity for creative teamwork in battle, their flight and attack patterns becoming more sophisticated and less immediately predictable than those of mere AI drones. They were still cowards for the most part, but you couldn't have everything. It was fair enough that realising they were alive would leave them not wanting to die.

And as long as they fought, it didn't really matter whether they were afraid or not. Cyclonus watched, weaving between the incoming fire, looking for an opening as the Sweeps and those lesser Decepticons who could reach the orbital battle pressed their attack in vain against the cloaking shields. It was clear that their efforts weren't going to be enough; but when Galvatron and the _Dis_ intervened, forcing the shields to overload and briefly wink out, Cyclonus was pleased to see how efficiently Sweeps Five and Six moved in to eliminate the huge laser platform that had been blasting craters into Charr's dusty surface. //Well done,// he sent quickly.

//Uh, thank you, Commander Cyclonus - ack!//

Five's reply cut off with a squeak of alarm as the platform's support vessel turned its gun batteries on them. The pair of Sweeps dodged in a flustered panic, laser fire scattering around them; and _that was the opening,_ that was where Cyclonus _should_ have been able to send in half a dozen Armada with their incendiaries and heavy armour. Stronger than the Sweeps, capable of withstanding and evading a capital ship's fire for long enough to bring it _down-_

Cyclonus cursed through gritted dentae, and charged.

Time slowed around him as his processors finally acknowledged the need to reassign every scrap of spare power to his battle computers. He launched himself across the battlefield, under the _Dis'_ prow, in front of the two startled Sweeps who gratefully fled as the enemy gunners abandoned them to target him. Barrage fire rained around him, bolts clipping stinging-close to his wings and hull; he twisted, rolled, dodged in an endless sequence of evasions, swerving like a drunken Stunticon towards his target. It was messy, it was desperate, it didn't compare to the elegant formation manoeuvre that his combat protocols were telling him he should be executing, but it _worked_ and he forced that useless instinct into silence. He _had_ no backup, no drone legions to deploy. There was just him.

Which became the literal truth as the cloaking shields came back online _behind_ him, cutting him off from the Decepticon forces. He didn't waste a backward glance, already knowing he was overextended and unsupported. The enemy cruiser with its birdlike lines and scarred silver plate was nearly on top of him, its laser batteries struggling to traverse down far enough to target him as he dropped under its flank. He could hardly believe they still weren't deploying fighter screens.

Unless they genuinely didn't have them. If some alien doctrine or hubris had led them to invest _all_ their defensive resources in those exotic cloaking shields, and now he was _inside_ them-!

It still didn't make the alien cruiser an easy target, or his solo assault anything other than reckless. The capital ship was bigger by far than he was, a mile-long wall of silver looming above him as he dived under its belly and jinked between fire from its scattering of ventral turrets. Galvatron's cannon might have been able to melt through its plating, but Cyclonus at his current power levels couldn't hope to carve it open from the outside in. He needed a weak spot, something that would allow him to send a triggering shot into its core and use its own internal fires to blow it apart.

He banked toward the cruiser's stern, his starboard wingtip almost touching the scarred armour above him. The trick of surviving against a much larger enemy was to get so close that they couldn't swat you away without clawing at their own metal: inside the zero range of their guns, closer than the span of their hands. It took courage and elite flight-coding, agility and speed.

Cyclonus had all of those, plus two full racks of firestorm missiles and what was left of Scourge's bootleg energon to fuel his lasers. He emerged from beneath the cruiser's belly, skimming just below the cones of greenish incandescence that jetted from its main drive thrusters, their heat washing molten over his armour. There was no use in targeting the thrusters directly. His incendiaries would detonate in those exhaust plumes long before they made contact with anything substantial. But around them would be manoeuvring jets, smaller ports and vents, potential vulnerabilities...

Only crackles and brief bursts of the Decepticon radio channels were reaching him through the shields, but he could still guess at the currents of the battle by the actions of the alien ships. When one of them, a smaller frigate, started to turn toward him and his chosen target, he knew he was on the right track. They had marked him as a threat worth diverting a second ship from the main battle to eliminate; therefore, he must be dangerously close to something he could use to hurt them.

All he had to do was _find_ it before that second ship could get a lucky shot off and disable him.

He turned, staying as close to the cruiser's exhaust plumes as he dared, and ran his targeting scanners over its stern. The ship was well designed, curving cowls and fairings protecting every potential weak spot, but there were a handful of minor attitude thrusters that by their very nature couldn't be directly covered over. One of those, perhaps-

A sudden shockwave slammed into him and he rolled, barely missing the closest of the exhaust jets as he scrambled to recover. The shields had collapsed again, and as he reoriented himself and glanced back towards the Decepticon lines he had a brief glimpse of the _Dis,_ prow cannons blazing, a flight of moleculon missiles spanning out from its launchers on twisting trails of fire. His spark soared, and the knowledge of whose hand and will were directing that glorious display of martial power only sweetened the sight. _Galvatron-!_

That astrosecond of distraction almost cost him dearly. The frigate completed its turn and opened fire on him as he was caught looking back at the _Dis_ , and pain crashed through him as a laser blast clipped the underside of his fuselage. Damage readouts flashed red in his visual display, cracked armour and a handful of minor circuit burns, nothing incapacitating-

// _Cyclonus!_ Do you need-//

//No! Stay back, Scourge, I can handle these two!// _His_ armour had withstood that hit well enough; his wingmate's lighter plating might not have. //Keep the others off the _Dis_!//

//If you're sure!//

That wasn't exactly a protocol reply, but Cyclonus would take it if it meant Scourge wasn't going to do something rash. He had too much to worry about where he was, as the frigate continued to pour fire in his direction and he engaged his pain overrides to keep moving without thinking about the sparks spitting from uncomfortably close to his lasercore housing. The cruiser was trying to turn now and if he stayed on its stern, he would expose himself to the full force of the frigate's broadside.

But if he let it come about far enough to reach him with its own batteries, he was in equal if not worse trouble. White noise hissed in his thoughts, his battle computers running probabilities and simulations so fast that to his conscious mind they surfaced as pure instinct. He moved with the cruiser, risking the frigate's guns in preference to the bigger craft's, holding his own fire. They didn't yet know what weaponry he had, so until he had a shot he was sure of, it was better to keep them in ignorance in case they had adaptive defences.

And then his tactical display lit up crimson as the frigate launched a homing torpedo.

They must have intelligent guidance systems that would recognise him as a target, but ignore an allied vessel. There was no other way they could safely fire at him with such a weapon when he was tucked into the cruiser's shadow. Locked down, dissociated deep beneath active combat protocols, he distantly felt the cold plunge of fear. If he couldn't evade-

Or perhaps he didn't need to. His processors raced so fast that the torpedo seemed to crawl across the void between them, lazy as a mechhawk riding a thermal in the wind. _Wait. Wait,_ letting it close in until it was almost on top of him as he held his vector to stay parallel with the cruiser's stern - and then he turned _in_ , pointing his nose toward one of those auxiliary vents he had marked as possible targets.

At the last possible moment, he launched a couple of his own missiles at the vent and then transformed, cut his flight engines, and let his residual momentum toss him out of the way.

The incendiaries plunged onward, seamlessly extending the trajectory he had been on a second before. Their miniature guidance engines glowed temptingly with the same pale fire as his jetmode's exhausts. And, spinning in the void with his real heat signature temporarily erased from the battlefield, Cyclonus watched as the enemy torpedo chased his decoys straight up the tail of their own ally.

He could almost taste, triumph bright like iron on his glossa, the absolute panic the crews of both ships must have felt as they realised the terrible miscalculation they had made. And then the rear section of the cruiser exploded.

The shockwave threw him across the battlefield like scrap metal, but he tucked in his limbs and let himself tumble with it, grateful for the distance from the frigate. The cloaking shields had collapsed once and for all, exposing the remaining enemy to the _Dis'_ artillery and the gathered Decepticon fire; Cyclonus came up, transformed and fired his thrusters, back online and ready to rejoin the fight.

And then, to his shock, they broke.

Five ships - still outnumbering and outgunning the Decepticons - turned and disengaged, wheeling away from Charr's orbit and scattering into the dark. Cyclonus launched himself in pursuit, aware of Scourge falling in on his flank, of Galvatron's scream of _Decepticons, after them!_ over the radio. He opened up with his lasers, dodging between the covering fire the aliens were sending in their wake, gaining on them as the bigger ships struggled for acceleration.

His spark burned with contempt. _They_ had come here, started this battle, and now they chose to abandon it? Admittedly their only loss so far had in a sense been their own fault, but it was still sheer cowardice to sacrifice an entire crew and then break while they still held the advantage. What kind of respect did _that_ show for their comrades, to throw away their lives and then decide to let those deaths be so utterly in vain?

He was still fuming, and firing, when space warped around the fleeing ships in a twisting burst of white light as they jumped to FTL. Cyclonus cursed and broke off, turning back to assess the remains of the battlefield. //Sweeps! Form up on me and sound off!//

// _Cowards!_ // Galvatron's outrage echoed Cyclonus's thoughts entirely. // _Get back here you-_ oh, never mind! Decepticons, stand down!//

//Are you all right?// Scourge sent on their private channel, cutting through the chaos of check-ins and boasting and complaints that was jamming up the army-wide frequency. //Cyclonus?//

//I'm fine.// He belatedly remembered to turn his pain sensors back on and double-check his diagnostics. //Nothing serious. Are you?//

//I, uh, they never touched me.// Scourge still sounded rattled. //But I thought for sure they'd got _you_ when that cruiser went up. That was amazing. How'd you do that?//

//Cyclonus!// Galvatron's voice cut across their conversation before he could reply. //Get back to the _Dis,_ I want you on the bridge!//

Was he imagining a note of covetousness in his lord's tone? And if not, what did it signify? His spark clenched, its pulse accelerating beyond any speed it had reached in combat. //On my way, mighty Galvatron!//

//...I'll tell you later, Scourge.//


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it becomes Galvatron's turn to have no idea what the hell is going on. Still no porn. Next chapter, I _promise_.

He couldn't believe they had _run away_.

Galvatron surfaced from the _Dis'_ command interface still incredulous, outraged at the temerity of the aliens to first start a fight - with _him!_ \- and then refuse to finish it. He had been looking forward to crushing the rest of them, not to mention salvaging whatever technology and materiel had survived the destruction afterwards. Ships that size didn't simply vaporise no matter how hard they were hit. There would have been plenty of interesting scrap to sift out of Charr's nearspace.

Still! There would at least be some resources to reclaim from the cruiser and the laser array, and if nothing else, _his_ forces had done their jobs to his satisfaction. The _Dis_ had performed magnificently despite its low energy reserves - he could feel its dark-shimmering pride as he told it as much - and the Sweeps had been downright competent, somewhat to his surprise. And as for Cyclonus-!

His gaze found and tracked the long, sleek, daggerlike silhouette that cruised slowly now through the remains of the battlefield. //Cyclonus! Get back to the _Dis,_ I want you on the bridge!//

//On my way, mighty Galvatron!//

He watched Cyclonus turn unerringly towards him and accelerate, scattering Sweeps and spacedust behind him in a wake of violet fire. So much skill and destructive force, and all of it so willingly bent to serve his least command or passing whim... _beautiful,_ he thought, with a flare of greedy, gloating pride. _Beautiful, and deadly, and mine, all mine-!_

Cyclonus disappeared past the edge of the viewport on his approach vector, heading down to his private drop bay below the bridge, and Galvatron's fingers curled against the _Dis'_ touchpad in satisfaction. Another moment or two, and he could have the pleasure of comparing battle reports with his lieutenant in person!

***

When the bridge doors slid open, it was clear to Galvatron that Cyclonus had taken his orders fully at face value. He hadn't even paused to patch the melted hole low on the side of his chestplate where the aliens had scored a hit on him. Blue light flickered in the wound amid the black curls of scorched wiring, but there was no sign of leaking fuel or anything actively on fire. It was seemingly no more, certainly as far as Cyclonus was concerned, than a mild inconvenience.

_How **dare** they,_ Galvatron thought as he rose from his command chair to greet his lieutenant. The flash of living energies behind broken metal was a magnet to his gaze - and he was delighted by the strength Cyclonus revealed, in refusing to deign to acknowledge it! - but those wretched aliens still hadn't deserved the honour of leaving so much as a scratch on _his_ warrior. "Cyclonus!"

"My lord Galvatron." Cyclonus saluted him, fist pressed to his spark and head briefly bowed. His battle protocols were still active, his fields damped to an unreadable sheen of silver over his armour. The whine of charged capacitors sang like a blade against the air over the heavier pulse of fast-idling engines.

Galvatron found himself pleased by that, that his lieutenant should come to him still geared up and ready to fight. It matched his own mood; unlike Cyclonus he didn't favour combat lockdowns and his fields were wide open as usual, but his targeting arrays were still online and his core systems hotwired with mechadrenaline that he hadn't yet chosen to filter out of them. He hadn't quite given up hope that their enemies might come back for more.

On the other hand, after what Cyclonus had done to them...!

"Well done!" He smiled fiercely, returning Cyclonus's salute with a nod of acknowledgement. "Quite an achievement, to take out that cruiser all by yourself! Make sure you archive your flight logs, I want to review them later!" He moved forward and reached out his hand, meaning to take Cyclonus's shoulder by way of approving emphasis.

He stopped short when Cyclonus gave him a startled, wide-opticked look of something incomprehensibly close to dismay.

The pleasurable anticipation of the moment before shattered in Galvatron's awareness like glass under laser fire. What reason had _Cyclonus_ to be dismayed?! _He_ had been the one to destroy the enemy cruiser; his performance in the field had been as brutally, elegantly exemplary as Galvatron could ever have asked of him. The wound below his arm might be spitting sparks but it was _nothing,_ a glancing strike that would be quick to repair and was no cause for shame. He had called his lieutenant here to praise him, only that - and yet Cyclonus looked almost as though he would rather be anywhere else!

Through the sudden edged tension in the air their optics met, and that shared glance snapped between them like lightning. Cyclonus's fields might be locked down but he couldn't lie with his gaze, certainly not when it was Galvatron who confronted him. Guilt, confusion, _doubt_ flashed in his expression, and he visibly fought not to bend his head, not to look _away-_

_No!_ This wasn't _right_ , he wouldn't have Cyclonus ashamed like this in his presence, not when his warrior had done nothing wrong! He wished suddenly, sharply for their pilot-bond, for the effortless communion of Cyclonus's thoughts and emotions melding with his and leaving no room for secrets between them. They were _built_ to trust each other!

The thought that that bond might have somehow become corrupted, might be _threatened,_ flooded his processors with the icy, needling static of an emotion Galvatron refused to name. _Why would he hide his spark from me? What has he done?!_

He stepped forward, urgently, his hand still extended. "Cyclonus?!"

And, unthinkably, Cyclonus _flinched_.

But, Galvatron thought, not precisely from _him_. The warrior's lockdowns faltered, as though his instincts were pulling him towards honesty despite himself; Galvatron took another swift step closer, pressing that brief advantage, his sensornets prickling with heightened gain as he tried to read everything he could from his lieutenant's fields in that one brief flicker. _Guilt, confusion,_ just as he had glimpsed in Cyclonus's optics, and the bitter edge of something confusingly close to _despair_ ; but underneath it all, still the familiar silver blaze of devotion that meant Cyclonus was _his._

He didn't let himself feel relief - that would imply that Cyclonus's loyalty had _ever_ hung in question, which _of course it hadn't!_ \- but his own fields instinctively snapped fire-hot with possessive dominance, a whipcrack _mine!_ to Cyclonus's unspoken oath of _yours_. _Mine, yes; so stop prevaricating and tell me what's wrong-!_

Cyclonus's wings twitched sharply upwards. His engines stuttered hard enough to be audible, and his optics were wide and bright. He ducked his head, half-raising a defensive hand; but his lockdowns were unravelling by the second and Galvatron caught _guilt_ and _apology_ from him, thick enough to choke on.

And a hot, bright flash of something _else_. Something like hunger, like desperation, something that briefly caught at his spark and _tugged_ before Cyclonus made a near-panicked attempt to rein it in-

_What?!_

"Cyclonus... what do you _want?_ "


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY, this fic earns its rating (which I've, er, actually raised after seeing how this chapter came out). Galvatron wants an explanation, Cyclonus wants something else entirely. (Content advisory: well, it's Galvatron and Cyclonus. Tactile interfacing, heavy D/s and chain-of-command dynamics, possessiveness, rough sex and a bit of pain kink. Arguably neither safe nor sane but all definitely consensual.)

When he had stepped aboard the _Dis_ , Cyclonus had had a plan. First of all, go straight to the bridge and find out what orders Galvatron had for him. Next, action those orders, whatever they happened to be. After that, as soon as Galvatron could spare him for a few hours, he was going to hand off the watch to Scourge and lock himself in the _Dis'_ maintenance bay for as long as it took to run a full set of diagnostics on his code and his cognitive circuitry and fix whatever he found. The warship could give him access to high-level reconstructive software and extensive libraries of reference code. No matter what was glitching in his systems, the _Dis_ should be able to help him find and eradicate it. He had only been able to hope that his current, flawed state hadn't been apparent to Galvatron as yet, and that he wouldn't give himself away face to face.

As soon as the bridge doors slid open, that hope disintegrated.

He had switched his lockdowns to their highest settings in preparation, trying to mask his thoughts even from himself so he could fall back safely on the formalities of duty and discipline, but lockdowns only controlled _outgoing_ field transmission. Nothing, in the confined space of the bridge, could have lessened the impact of Galvatron's presence. No secrets or dissembling for him - the Herald's aura was unlocked as always, a wide open blaze of plasma-scarred golden light flickering with half a dozen moods at once, and Cyclonus shivered as that tide of uncensored emotion broke over him. _Warlust, exasperation, amusement, triumph-!_

And then, as Galvatron rose to his feet and smiled at the sight of him, a wash of _approval_ and _pride_ and _welcome_ that nearly sent him to his knees with guilt and shame. Galvatron clearly _didn't_ know how compromised he was, or that everything he had achieved in that battle had hung by a tenuous thread of undeserved luck. He managed somehow to salute, bow, stand his ground through the bittersweet pleasure of hearing his lord praise him.

Until Galvatron stepped forward and reached out to grip his shoulder.

He feared to think what must have shown in his face. But he saw and felt Galvatron's reaction like a plasma blast scorching against his armour and there was _nothing he could do,_ no apology that wouldn't lead further into disaster, no excuse he could offer without inevitably revealing that he had deserved Galvatron's wrath in the first place. He only half-heard Galvatron call his name, his processors stalling out in guilt and self-reproach, barely aware that his lockdowns were giving way and everything he felt was spilling uncensored into his fields. _Galvatron, forgive me, I'm yours, all the blame here lies with me...!_

_**Mine!** _

That flash of dominance through Galvatron's aura was like being struck in the face, enough to snap him out of the cascade crash-and-burn that had briefly threatened to engulf him. He gasped, optics widening as he was shocked back to himself, and looked up as Galvatron stalked closer to him with his hand still outstretched.

" _Cyclonus..._ "

And at once he was falling all over again, this time into the depths of his lord's optics as Galvatron's blazing gaze pinned him where he stood. His threat assessment protocols flashed amber, _be cautious, potential danger;_ he dismissed them with a thought. The last thing that mattered was whether Galvatron might hurt him. His spark raced, trembling too fast in its crystal cage; he couldn't look away from the tilt of Galvatron's proud crowned helm, from the play of crimson light behind his optic glass.

From the flex of silver lips, as the Herald spoke again. "What do you _want?_ "

The words struck him like the shock of being touched on some deep internal component that should never have been laid bare. "I don't - I don't _know_ , mighty Galvatron. Forgive me-"

"Don't lie to me, Cyclonus! You want _something_ , I can all but taste it!" Galvatron took another threatening step toward him. "Answer me!"

What _did_ he want? He was too dazed to interpret his own feelings, let alone to work out what his fields must be projecting. Galvatron's nearness was like a brand against his plating and it made no _sense_ , he was accustomed to having Galvatron closer than this, _touching_ him even-

His engines stuttered and then raced, spinning up without his direction. His capacitors ached at the sudden surge of charge and his circuits sparked with mechadrenaline, as the pieces of everything that had happened in the last half-day finally fell into place and he was left with only a single bewildering, inescapable truth.

 _Don't lie to me,_ Galvatron had said, and it had been a clear order. He still had to stop and reset his vocaliser before he could force the words out. "I - I want you to touch me, my lord."

"What?" Galvatron stopped short, his tone turning quizzical and his fields lighting up with surprise. "Touch you how, Cyclonus? And why?!"

"Because something in my spark craves it, my lord, and I don't _know_ why." It was easier to find words now that Galvatron had relented enough to truly listen to him, now that he wasn't trying to function through the static-white anguish of feeling his lord's displeasure directed at him. Impulsive, urgent revelations pressed their way to his vocaliser, as his processors belatedly caught up with everything he had been forcing out of his conscious thoughts until now. "I want - I _feel_ that I want your hands on my armour, your touch to control me, your frame against mine..." He trailed off in shame, heat flooding into his fields at his own words. He had surely said more than enough, and he braced himself for the consequences.

But Galvatron's optics flashed bright, and he closed in on Cyclonus with a grin. "All right, let's see what happens!"

"My lord-!"

For all his size and weight and heavy armour, Galvatron could strike like his namesake lightning when he pleased. Cyclonus's back and wings crashed against the bridge doors as Galvatron pushed him back into them, and he cried out as sudden, dazzling pleasure exploded through his awareness. " _Galvatron!_ "

He was overwhelmed in a sparkpulse as Galvatron's weight and strength pinned him down, as Galvatron's aura drenched him in molten heat and light. His plating was on fire everywhere Galvatron's frame touched his - _oh, bliss, yes!_ \- and his engines raced as his processors struggled futilely to catch up with his sensornets. _Want_ spread through him like some wildfire virus; all his shame and lingering guilt were swept aside as, impossibly, he ran out of active memory to hold onto them. He keened out loud and arched into Galvatron's hands, shock and gratitude and bewildered delight flooding helplessly into his fields. _My lord, my lord, please...!_

"Is this what you wanted, Cyclonus?!"

"Yes - _yes_ \- please, my lord, oh...!"

" _Hmmm!_ "

Galvatron fairly purred, intrigue and interest glittering bright in his fields. His hands gripped, moved; Cyclonus arched again with a cry, lightning racing beneath his armour in the wake of every touch. He still didn't wholly understand what had possessed his frame to react like this, but it was making Galvatron _touch_ him and grin delightedly at him, and Cyclonus would have sacrificed far more than his dignity to see his lord's optics sparkle with such glee.

And Galvatron's caresses might be forceful enough to be edged with pain, but Cyclonus was built to take the weight of Galvatron's will in battle: to be pushed to his limits at Galvatron's command, and not merely endure but _enjoy_ it. _This_ , strange and new though it was in some ways, was hijacking the same neural pathways and triggering the same feedback routines, and that hint of warforged violence beneath the pleasure only brought with it the sweetness of familiarity. " _Hhh_ \- ah, Galvatron, _please..._ "

"I think I like you like this, Cyclonus!" Galvatron murmured. His engines revved, shaking both their frames where they pressed together, and he bent his head and nuzzled inquisitively at Cyclonus's throat; Cyclonus keened between gritted dentae, shocked both at the unexpected intimacy and at how much his sensornets instantly cried out for more of it. "You're not to do this for anyone else. I forbid it!"

As if he would _want_ to. "I won't, my lord, I wouldn't - I belong only to you." He moaned and tilted his head back. "Please, oh... do as you wish with me..."

" _Mmm._ " Galvatron growled approvingly - the vibration of it pulsed through Cyclonus's exposed throat and made him writhe in his lord's grip - and then opened his mouth and bit.

Flexmetal creased under his dentae, and Cyclonus let out a cry that was very nearly a scream. Lightning-shocks of charge pulsed into his already aching capacitors and through the core circuitry beneath his chestplate. The sharp crushing pressure of Galvatron's dentae seemed to short-circuit every sensor he had from his spinal strut to his spark containment, and the sense of delicious, helpless submission he felt as his lord playfully shook him by the throat was enough to drive his altmode's buried slave-coding wild with ecstasy. He briefly had to override his transformation cog, instincts protesting that _surely_ he should be in his other shape for Galvatron to claim such dominance of him-!

Instead, he clutched at Galvatron's shoulders, desperately trying to press their frames closer together, trembling in delirious surrender. " _Ohhh!_ Please, my lord, _please!_ "

" _Cyclonus,_ " Galvatron growled, his tone gleeful. "You weren't lying, were you?! You _like_ this...!"

"Hhh- _yes,_ mighty Galvatron, please, don't stop..." His engines revved, raced, nuclear turbines spinning white-hot; charge flooded his capacitors with nowhere to go. His weapon systems ached, and his frame tensed and shuddered as he writhed under a strain as intense as anything he had ever felt in battle."My lord, you're _breaking_ me - please, _Galvatron-!_ "

"Cyclonus..." Galvatron's hands roamed greedily over his frame, Galvatron's mouth was hot on his dented throat. "You're _mine,_ I'll break you if I please! Mmm... you're delicious like this."

He really must be, he realised. With his armour crackling with stray charge from crest to toeplates, he surely tasted as sweet as high-grade energon on Galvatron's glossa right now. The thought made his knee servos shake. "Thank you... mighty Galvatron... please, I'm yours, take anything you want-!"

"Don't worry, I _will,_ " Galvatron promised. He reached up and thrust his hand behind Cyclonus's back, between his shoulders, gripping his cockpit canopy. "Open this for me," he commanded.

 _There?! - oh, yes!_ "My lord..." Cyclonus released his latches with urgent haste, letting the canopy pop loose against Galvatron's hand; and Galvatron made a fiercely satisfied noise and plunged his fingers into the space beneath it, his touch sparking on Cyclonus's miniaturised consoles and control panels.

Those systems weren't fully active in his root mode to begin with and the stimulation they were getting now was incoherent tactile noise, nothing like the precision of Galvatron's touch when Cyclonus was in jet mode and carrying him. Still, the familiarity of it and the wonderful reminder of how utterly he _belonged_ to Galvatron had him crying out, pressing blindly into that touch and no longer even aware of what words spilled from his lips. All his thoughts were _Galvatron_ and _please_ and _yes_ , and then his vision flashed crimson with excess-charge warnings and his capacitors were _bursting_ and-

He fought for self-control, tried to dump power through his peripheral systems, teetered on the brink. "My lord - systems overloading - I can't-"

" _Let them,_ " Galvatron murmured against his audial, and held him tight.

" _-nnnh!_ "

He had experienced charge overloads before - a handful of times, in battle, when excessive use of his guns had led to capacitor fade and the consequent inevitable hard resets. A moment of distraction, a rippling pulse of not-unpleasant sensation followed by the hungry surge of power-draw through his engines as his emptied, reset capacitors refilled. He had never before in his life overloaded at _full_ capacitance. It shouldn't have been functionally possible.

Much less should it have felt so good. He cried out in unbearable relief as the pressure against his relay interlocks burst free, charge flooding to the surface of his plating and breaking loose in a storm that sent tongues of lightning lashing to every ground point in range of him. The sudden cataclysmic voltage drop felt like plunging in freefall, like the giddy rush of a power dive overtaking gravity; his gyros phased, his knees buckled, and he clung to Galvatron for support.

And Galvatron gasped and groaned and shuddered, gripping him so fiercely that he could feel his armour creak, and Cyclonus abruptly realised that most of his shed charge was earthing _on Galvatron._ A glittering web of silver-blue static united them, chains of fire binding him to his lord; and Cyclonus gasped in awe, at both the wild beauty of it and the belated realisation of what it implied. Galvatron was always half starving, always struggling to keep his capacitors topped off and his vast energy demands met on the restricted rations the Decepticons could afford. But if Cyclonus could _give_ Galvatron his charge so easily, surrender his own power like this for Galvatron to take-!

" _Cyclonus,_ " Galvatron gasped, and bit down on his throat again; Cyclonus bucked, pushing himself frantically against his lord as fresh pleasure stabbed his sensornets. "That's it, Cyclonus, _more-!_ "

The flood of his charge was already slowing, capacitor gauges plunging towards zero as he watched them. Still he made an effort, pumped out all he had left. " _Oh_ \- here, Galvatron, _yes..._ " _Take it, take me, please!_

He wasn't aware, in the end, of his knees giving way. When he blinked, he was kneeling on the deck, utterly drained, his frame weighted with a delicious exhaustion. Galvatron knelt with him, still holding him, looking into his optics. "Cyclonus?!"

He looked back; dazed, swept clean, with nothing left to offer his lord but his unbroken loyalty. "Mighty Galvatron," he murmured, bowing his head a little. 

And, breathtakingly, Galvatron's gaze _softened_ , as though that was enough. " _My_ Cyclonus," he growled, and drew him close.

Cyclonus leaned gratefully against his shoulder, trembling in joy. He felt Galvatron's hand press his canopy closed, its latches clicking into place. "Thank you, my lord," he breathed.

"Mmm... we should do that more often!" Galvatron felt so hot and bright in his arms, his systems alive with the power he had taken from Cyclonus, his fields molten with plasma-glow and possessive delight. "Whatever it was!" He purred, gloating, and stroked the crest of Cyclonus's helm. "Would you like that, Cyclonus?"

"...yes _please,_ mighty Galvatron."

"Excellent!"

The warm, idle caress of Galvatron's hand on his helm was devastating what little was left of Cyclonus's higher processor functioning. He made an effort to blink his way back to coherence when Galvatron went on speaking. "How in the void did you think of that?!"

A reasonable question, but one to which _I caught the Battlechargers doing something peculiar in a corridor and things have somehow escalated from there_ seemed such an inadequate answer. This had felt like something almost holy, worlds away from that episode of opportunist fumbling. "That, ah, might be a long story, my lord."

"So? I don't exactly have anything else on my immediate schedule!"

The words were sharp, but Galvatron's fields flickered with playfulness. Cyclonus let slip a breath of a laugh, ran a hasty review of his recent databank caches, and started trying to explain.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which two characters in this fic _finally_ manage to be honest about their feelings and get most of the way to working out what's going on. Content notes: minor PTSD flashbacks, mentions of past torture, discussions of servitude and encoded directives, eroticisation of violence. Everything happening onscreen in present time is freely consensual. No actual sex in this one, just talking, petting and aftercare.

Galvatron knelt on the deck of his flagship's bridge with his second-in-command curled trembling in his arms, and tried to work out what in the galaxy had just happened.

 _I want you to touch me,_ Cyclonus had said, and it had seemed an odd request, but an innocent one. Even flattering, that that was _all_ Cyclonus should ask for from the depths of such obvious distress. Galvatron's worst thought in that moment had been that Cyclonus might be about to turn on him, or _away_ from him; and instead he had asked for _that_. As though Galvatron's hands alone might have the power to resolve whatever guilt or glitch was tormenting him. As though he had chosen to throw himself on Galvatron's mercy, on his faith that Galvatron as his lord and commander would take responsibility for him, _save_ him somehow...

Galvatron would have been moved to indulge him for that show of loyalty alone. The fact that he had been halfway to touching Cyclonus already had only made the decision easier. If they both wanted the same thing anyway, where was the harm-? and if he had been rougher than he had first intended, that was mostly because Cyclonus's words had made clear that he _wanted_ far more than a mere hand on the shoulder. Even so, the intensity of Cyclonus's reaction had been a profound surprise. Galvatron hadn't been sure what he expected, but it certainly wasn't for his proud lieutenant to fall in surrender at a simple touch. _That_ had been a side of Cyclonus he had never expected to see or feel outside of their pilot-bond.

Or perhaps something that went beyond even that. In battle together they were both focused on the same targets, Cyclonus acting as a conduit for Galvatron's power and skill. In _this_ Cyclonus had _been_ the target, writhing and pleading and crying out under Galvatron's hands - except that instead of pain or fear, he had been pouring nothing through his aura and voice but need and devotion and pleasure-! At least, until the cumulative effects of that pleasure had somehow driven him to a full-frame capacitor reset, which to judge by his reaction had been exquisitely enjoyable.

Not that it hadn't been delicious to receive, too. Galvatron's own capacitors were still warm from that surge of shed power, tingling with captured charge stamped with Cyclonus's energy signature and the lingering field-echoes of _trust_ and _joy_ and _gratitude_. And even now Cyclonus was still clinging to him, leaning limp against his shoulder as though he had only one functioning thought process left and had chosen to commit it to adoring his lord. Galvatron stroked his helm soothingly for that, holding him close in triumph. Cyclonus was his, _his!_ \- and while he had always belonged to Galvatron and both of them knew as much, this new means of affirming it was _perfect_.

That they should do this again - now, later, _lots!_ \- seemed a foregone conclusion; he voiced that thought and was gratified when Cyclonus fervently agreed with him. His mind was already running back over what they had done, looking for ways to refine it. Caught with no chance to strategise he had been simply improvising, his hands guided only by the shifts of Cyclonus's frame and fields as he reacted to each touch. _Biting_ him had been pure greedy instinct on Galvatron's part, the crackle and arc of excess charge across Cyclonus's bared throat an irresistible temptation.

But Cyclonus had _liked_ it, even when Galvatron had been causing him pain...! Something flickered hot down Galvatron's spinal struts at that thought. Of course they should do this again - he wanted to do it _better_ , to find more things that would make Cyclonus arch and cry out and press into his hands as if Galvatron's touch was the only thing in the universe worth desiring. He wanted to hear his own name on Cyclonus's lips again in that tone of pleading ecstasy, to feel that glittering silver-fire thrill of Cyclonus's charge spilling over his armour and soaking into his circuitry...

It might help to know what had inspired Cyclonus to make his unexpected petition in the first place. "How in the void did you think of that?" he murmured.

Cyclonus shifted somewhat awkwardly at the question, despite the benevolent intent behind it. "That, ah, might be a long story, my lord," he replied, rather carefully.

"So? I don't exactly have anything else on my immediate schedule!" ...well, assuming they weren't suddenly attacked again, at least. He was pleased, though, when Cyclonus summoned a quiet laugh at his teasing. Much as making Cyclonus melt down like that under his touch was delicious, he would never have wanted to accidentally erase the rest of his lieutenant's personality in consequence. It was good to get that small confirmation that he hadn't.

Cyclonus paused for another moment, nonetheless, presumably locating the rest of his scattered processor threads. "I think it started with Scourge and I noticing some strange behaviour in the other Decepticons, my lord," he began at last. "It turns out that there's a practice among them known as _elective interfacing_."

He automatically tossed the unfamiliar term to his databank search function. "Hmm?"

"It involves direct connections between mechs. Charge _and_ data, with integrated emotional and sensory linking." Cyclonus looked up as though half afraid of Galvatron's reaction, his discomfort with the idea clear in his expression. "The security implications were my first thought, so I checked our blueprints immediately."

"And?!"

"None of us have the necessary hardware, thankfully. Of course we have our own command-interface circuitry, but that's only compatible among ourselves, and it doesn't have any direct hardline access. This... _interfacing equipment_ does, and worse, the systems are universalised - and bidirectional. It's standard in Cybertronian frames. The whole army has it."

Galvatron startled, a shudder running through him as his firewalls and defensive protocols instinctively reacted to the very idea: _lock down, resist, access denied!_ "Bidirectional - what _for?!_ "

And yet, even as he asked the question, something deep in the back of his mind was scratching for his attention. Darkness, crimson light, _claws in his head_ \- tattered, half-suppressed memories of being neither himself nor someone else, pinned and stretched across a wireframe rack as his existence hung in the balance and all the vast reserves of data stored in his memory banks and libraries were sorted and blended and _split..._ Pain snapped white-hot behind his optics and he let out a ragged growl, clenching his fist against Cyclonus's armour.

"Galvatron?"

There was quick, solicitous concern in Cyclonus's voice, but Galvatron was more aware of the cool silver of his warrior's fields against his sensors. Soothing, familiar - _stabilising_ , like stumbling across a navigation beacon in some lost reach of space. He shook his head, pulling himself together. "I'm _fine_ , Cyclonus, I'm just trying to _think!_ ...go on."

Cyclonus, wisely, nodded and obeyed. "I had Scourge do some additional investigation for me, and _he_ found that he and I both have contextual data, but it was all de-indexed, which is why we never noticed it before. I, ah, imagine you might have the same files, my lord.

"But in brief, this protocol seems to have been installed in the firstforged Cybertronians by Primus to encourage his creations to interact with each other. It's positively linked to the emotional regulation and sensory modules; presumably so that they'll associate mutual connection with pleasure, and so be more inclined to cooperate efficiently."

It was only the barest struts of a summary, but it correlated with what Galvatron half-remembered, and with what he was finally finding in his own databanks now that he'd caught Cyclonus's remark about the relevant files being de-indexed. He only glanced into those files, and then hastily dismissed them before his processors could load more than a fraction of the data. Even that glimpse was too much, filling him with a sudden cloying sensation like being surrounded by crushing frames and importunate clinging hands, being pulled _down._ Indiscriminately trading data with an endless stream of others... how, in the end, would you remember who you _were?!_

"It clearly didn't work very well, given that they ripped themselves to pieces in a nine million year war!" he observed out loud, that vicious thought as cleansing as the feeling of cold void against his armour. "So much for _till all are one!_ But what does this have to do with _you_ , Cyclonus - or with what happened just now?!"

"After Scourge and I found all this out, I was considering the implications of it. The idea of being able to connect freely with _anyone_ , up to a virtual stranger or even an enemy, disturbed me a great deal." He glanced up and seemed reassured by whatever he saw in Galvatron's face, which was unsurprising given that Galvatron _entirely agreed with him_. "I was trying to understand how they could tolerate the risk, and indeed why they ever would. But I - forgive me - I couldn't seem to stop my thoughts from coming back... to you."

Something flickered warm in Galvatron's spark at that. "To me?" he queried, more gently than the rest of his current mood might have ordinarily prompted.

"My mind kept wandering; only now I think it wasn't wandering at all, only drawing a parallel." Cyclonus shivered briefly, and he pressed his helm against Galvatron's shoulder pylon as though seeking comfort. "I was made for you, mighty Galvatron," he went on, his voice confessional-soft. "I exist to serve as your lieutenant, but also as your weapon to destroy at your command. I have entire systems configured so that _only_ you can use them, and you _know_ how it feels for me when you do."

Oh, he _did_ , and the fact that they couldn't do it any more was as frustrating to him as it surely was to Cyclonus. Galvatron growled and nodded his agreement. "But those are _combat_ systems," he pointed out. "Part of our core functions! What do those have in common with something as perverse as these Cybertronian protocols?"

" _Pleasure,_ my lord." There was a flicker of awkwardness in Cyclonus's fields at that even now, as though despite everything he was still embarrassed at his earlier shamelessness. "Cybertronians may connect to each other to further Primus's purpose of unity, but Primus motivated them to serve that purpose by making sure they would enjoy it. And - my lord, I may be wrong, but I think now that _our_ creator saw that as something he could use in us. He deleted the hardware and hid the context files, but I believe he repurposed the code. The libraries, the sensory callfiles, the _desire_ that Primus gave to his creations... my guess is that those were moved into our battle coding and seek-and-destroy imperatives, maybe even into our own command-interface software. He wanted us to crave ruin as deeply as Cybertronians seek union, and take as much pleasure in it.

"He turned those protocols into _weaponry_. And I think what I feel when you touch me is simply... you might call it a side effect. Quite probably not even part of his intentions."

Galvatron's optics widened as the sense, the _implications_ of the words struck home. Memories and sensory echoes cascaded flickering in his thoughts, a flood of fire and fury and blinding light. That ravenous spark-deep joy in destruction that he had always taken for granted as simply part of what he _was..._

...which it _still_ was, however it had come to be there! Unicron was dead and they were alive, _free_ \- everything they had managed to keep was their own now, whatever its provenance. For a second time he threw off the thought of darkness and fire and claws combing through his mind; shaking his head with a snarl and feeling sparks snap at the stress points of his helm, but gripping Cyclonus reassuringly tighter when the warrior's fields flashed with renewed concern.

"I think you might be correct, Cyclonus! I'm sure that would have amused him greatly, to take something that Primus designed to bring his creations together and turn it into something that would help _us_ to tear them apart!" His mouth twisted in a dark half-smile, appreciating the sadistic elegance of it even as his spark flared with defiance. "But what our creator intended isn't our problem, now is it? Not anymore!" 

Cyclonus shivered. Something cold and flinching prickled briefly in his aura before he meshed his fields loyally tighter with Galvatron's, as though he wanted to soak up Galvatron's conviction to strengthen his own. "I very much hope not, my lord," he muttered.

"Well, I'm _certain_ he didn't intend us doing _this!_ "

 _This_ was emphasised with a caressing press of his fingers to the seam on Cyclonus's back below his cockpit, and Cyclonus gasped softly and arched eagerly against him. Heat spread through the warrior's fields, washing away that momentary chill; Galvatron answered it with a pulse of approving pride. " _That's_ better, Cyclonus. Remember, you belong to nobody now but me!"

"Oh... yes, mighty Galvatron."

Cyclonus's optics darkened beautifully and his lips parted as he tipped his head up, visibly relaxing into the words and the warmth of Galvatron's approval; Galvatron rewarded him for that with another touch, watching delightedly as pleasure flickered across his lieutenant's features. "And here and now I'm most interested in this _side effect_ of yours!" He grinned.

Cyclonus shivered, nestling closer, practically melting into his arms. "Then - you don't disapprove?" he ventured tentatively, sounding oddly perplexed.

"Disapp- _why_ would I disapprove, Cyclonus?! I don't care how this got into our coding, it's ours now to use as we please!" _Disapprove_ , really, what was Cyclonus thinking?! How could Galvatron _not_ be delighted by him like this, especially knowing that it was securely rooted in the very core of what they were to each other? "Whatever the Decepticons want to do among themselves is no threat to us, since we don't share their hardware... and you seem to be enjoying this, and I certainly am!

"Though perhaps it's better done somewhere that isn't the floor!" He shifted his weight, belatedly conscious that they were hardly in the most comfortable of positions.

"What about the recharge room, my lord? It's secure, and the padding might be - useful." Embarrassment flickered briefly in Cyclonus's fields again.

Perhaps deservedly, this time. He, after all, had been the one to lose control of his servos and land on the deck. "Excellent idea! Come, then." It had been long enough now that he was fairly sure their enemies weren't coming back, and it would only take him a moment to settle the _Dis_ in orbital standby and tell Scourge to keep the army under control for a while.

And _then,_ he was going to go over Cyclonus's frame a micrometre at a time, and find out exactly what else this so-called side effect could do.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Galvatron and Cyclonus get a bit more practice in. No plot, just porn and feelings. Content notes: tactile interfacing, chain-of-command D/s dynamics, praise kink, loyalty kink, all consensual. Cyclonus may possibly be having the best day of his life.

Like many things about Unicron's creations, the primary recharge room aboard the _Dis_ was distinctly archaic. Modern Cybertronians, forced to every possible economy by fuel shortages and war, had pared down the concept of a recharge berth to its most minimal form: a simple platform just large enough for a single mech, holding only a compact version of the inductive circuits that allowed the user to slowly build up a reserve of charge without using up their own fuel supplies. The resultant slab-and-rail plinths were little more than military cots; they worked, more or less, but they were anything but comfortable.

But the _Dis_ had never been expected to run short of power, and its crew were dedicated war machines with vast capacitor banks and thick armour that necessitated heavy-duty charging systems. Consequently, instead of separate plinths the ship had a full-sized, old-fashioned recharge _floor_ , embedded with wide-reach circuits that threw an induction field deep enough to bathe in and easily powerful enough to recharge all three Unicronians at once if they chose to share it. High-density padding blocks supported their frames, leadvelvet thermal blankets trapped heat to ensure that they would never be caught scrambling to come up to operating temperature even if urgently awoken from deep recharge. It was a system configured absolutely for performance over economy.

It was also, by current standards, an almost mythical luxury. Comparing it to the Decepticons' barracks on Charr and his second-hand memories of those on Cybertron during the war, Galvatron had to wonder if there was a Cybertronian still functioning who even remembered what a proper rest cycle felt like. Even now, when the circuitry only ran at half-power as a gesture toward their straitened circumstances, it still felt like an indulgence to stretch out in the rippling charge field, pull a couple of blankets over oneself and shut down in comfort. The armourglass roof above revealed a panoramic view of the stars that did away with any threat of claustrophobia, dim lightwire illumination prompted and eased the transition into shutdown mode, and extensive soundproofing and shielding, plus a lockable armoured door, provided for the occupants' safety during the comparative vulnerability of a rest cycle.

All essential features, of course, at least for a hyper-elite combat team; which meant that the recharge floor remained a justifiable expenditure in their resource budget no matter what the circumstances. Today, though, Galvatron found himself appreciating it like never before.

" _Galvatron-_ "

"Shh, Cyclonus..."

He had his lieutenant at his mercy. Face-down in the drifts of blankets, sprawled across the floor, the warrior was pinned in place by Galvatron's weight on his hips and midsection and Galvatron's knee braced into the back of his thigh. His head was turned to the side so that Galvatron could see his face - optics darkened and half-shuttered, lips parted - and his fingers clutched and curled, gripping desperately into the padding beneath him. The air sang with the ring of steel as his taut-flexed wings quivered.

And all Galvatron was doing was touching him. He _knew_ how Cyclonus was put together - of course he did, you couldn't pilot-link with someone and _not_ know their frame like your own - but he was enthralled now as he ran his hands over Cyclonus's armour, palms moulding to the contours of his flanks, fingertips tracing the blade-sharp aerofoil edges of his wings. He had never paid attention before to how exquisitely smooth Cyclonus's high-tech stealth paint felt to touch, or attempted to trace the layout of his sensornets purely by following the subtle energy patterns in his fields. Now, remapping him like this from the outside one caress at a time, Galvatron was utterly fascinated.

And Cyclonus's response...! His engines hitched and stuttered at every touch, and he pressed himself up into Galvatron's hands as urgently as a starving mech reaching for a fuel line. Tiny gasps and moans kept slipping from his vocaliser; his fields were a halo of silver light, fully unlocked now and syrupy-thick with his charge. Between his own over-reactive engines and the recharge floor's induction fields, his capacitors must be full almost to the brim, and the excess was spilling into his aura and washing back over Galvatron's plating.

It felt almost like being back on Thrull, with the aether glow of plasma soaking into his seams. The warmth, the sense of power free for the taking, was the same; but this power was charged with _emotion_ , with the strength of a living spark that all but worshipped him, and _that_ was so exquisite that he wanted to drink it down like highgrade. Cyclonus's aura was awash with pleasure and submission and trust, dazed joy and _want_ , all laid before Galvatron like eagerly-offered tribute. It was nothing short of intoxicating.

He even _tasted_ good, just as he had back on the bridge when Galvatron had taken him by the throat. The loose charge that crackled in his seams and crawled across his armour burned like silver-sweet fire, and every taste of it only made Galvatron hungry for the next. On a whim, he bent his head and extended his glossa to trace the static-shimmer of charge in the seam that ran up the crest of Cyclonus's helm.

Cyclonus tensed, his engines stuttering. Pleasure snapped bright through his fields and he tilted his head as though to better offer himself for Galvatron's mouth, a tiny, eager sound escaping him. Galvatron growled reassurance to him and licked him slowly, thoroughly; savouring the tingling sweetness of his energies, the rush of feedback as his touch prompted Cyclonus's systems to release even more charge. "Good, Cyclonus," he murmured, hardly thinking before he spoke. "So good..."

"My _lord_..." Cyclonus sounded almost drugged with bliss. "Oh, please..."

It was slowly dawning on Galvatron that he had been taking his lieutenant for granted. He had been relying without a second thought on Cyclonus ever since he returned to the Decepticons, and in their current ragged operational state had had no more reward to offer him than a word of praise or a smile now and then. And yet Cyclonus had served him without a whisper of complaint, through the loss of his core functions and the addition of far too many new ones that were no part of his original coding, through confusion and hunger and chaos; never faltering, never asking for respite, seemingly content only to obey...

He had been _blind_ , he thought, briefly frustrated at himself. For all his private gloating over Cyclonus, it had never occurred to him to draw his lieutenant close and do any of that gloating out loud and face to face. _Now,_ though, he knew better, and he could _do_ better. Having learned that his warrior didn't merely acquiesce to his touch but actively _desired_ it, he could use that knowledge to reward Cyclonus as lavishly as he deserved; and, too, to open up his spark and be sure of his fealty without having to wonder what was hidden behind that mask of discipline. In this state it was clear that Cyclonus could conceal nothing from him, and wasn't even trying.

He had considered it his right all along to demand anything of his lieutenant, and of course it _was_. But in the ongoing absence of their pilot-bond to calibrate their minds and sparks to one another, it seemed he had underestimated how much, and in how limitlessly intimate a capacity, Cyclonus would _welcome_ any such demand. If anything he had been wasting Cyclonus's loyalty by asking too little of it, not taxing it by asking too much.

That thought made his spark flare with greed and pride. "Cyclonus," he murmured, stroking his fingertips possessively down the ridge of the warrior's cockpit.

Cyclonus shivered and arched back into the touch - so beautifully, unashamedly compliant, so _willing_. "Mmh... my lord?"

"Is that good?" It _was_ , every pulse of Cyclonus's charge-slick fields and every quivering flex of his struts proclaimed it so; but he wanted to give Cyclonus the chance to say it. "Tell me."

Cyclonus, of course, did not disappoint him. "Ohh... _yes,_ mighty Galvatron, yes..." His voice was ragged. Metal creaked briefly as his tensor cables strained, and he shuddered against Galvatron as though he could barely control his own frame. "Please..."

"More?" Galvatron prompted, teasingly indulgent. Cyclonus was beautiful in this state of helpless pleasure, and Galvatron didn't need any more incentive than that to keep toying with him. But he would never be averse to hearing his precious favourite beg; and maybe Cyclonus _would_ , if he wanted this enough-

" _Please..._ if you will it, my lord."

Such scrupulous awareness of his place, even now. Gratified, Galvatron growled softly, encouragingly in his audial. "I _do_ will it!" he promised. "You deserve this, Cyclonus... so loyal all this time, and you never ask me for anything..."

His hands moved over his warrior's armour, slow and sensual, his words and touch and fields all pitched to drive home the same message: _you are mine, and I am well pleased with you!_ "My Cyclonus - blade of the void, assassin of sparks, despoiler of worlds-! _mine_ , magnificent, second only to me! My perfect weapon, so faithful... there, shh, you've _earned_ this-"

-and Cyclonus gasped, tensed, shuddered beneath him, and overloaded with a broken little cry. His charge flooded over Galvatron's armour slick as oil and shimmering like mercury, sparks cascading between them; Galvatron let out a startled sound and instinctively grasped his lieutenant to him, _here, I have you, yes-!_ "Cyclonus?!"

" _Oh-_ my lord," Cyclonus managed, trembling. "Forgive me-"

Had he really driven Cyclonus to the breaking point of pleasure by doing nothing more than _praise_ him? He would have thought that was impossible. " _Forgive_ you? What - you did _nothing_ wrong!" Nothing at all-! not when his own capacitors were hungrily soaking up every last trace they could capture of Cyclonus's release, when between the insulating blankets and the induction field and Cyclonus's sparkfelt gift, for once he felt _warm_ from the outside inward as well as the inside out. Usually he had to tap the power of his plasma-boosted core systems just to eke out his fuel rations and stay combat-ready and functional - now he was having power poured into him almost faster than even he could use it?! No, that required no apology _at all._

Though it did demand further investigation. "Is that," he asked, "going to happen _every_ time we do this?!"


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The practice session continues. Cyclonus isn't familiar with the phrase "touch-starved" but someone should probably explain it to him. Content notes: as per previous chapters, plus a bit of light sadism, masochism and fetishisation of violence. Still all extremely consensual.

Pinned beneath Galvatron's weight, trembling in the backwash of overload as his charge management systems reset, Cyclonus tried to pull himself together and answer that.

The code that governed almost every aspect of a Transformer's functioning was deliberately plastic. It adapted, self-edited, _changed_ to reflect new needs and realities as they moved through the universe. A few central elements were fixed: first and foremost the spark, source and seat of identity, and the core directives that were integrated to it and thus locked to be unalterable. The key strands of factional coding that differentiated an Autobot from a Decepticon - or indeed a Unicronian - were permanent no matter whether the mech possessing them changed their badge or oath; and the all-important altmode integration protocols, bound up with the core directives, could be modified only as far as the spark could bear to accept.

But day-to-day coding, the routines that handled secondary functions or simple systems management, could and did adapt with pragmatic ease. Cyclonus had been almost as surprised by that overload as the previous one - he had been lost in joy at his lord's fierce, caressing words and touch, not paying attention to his frame's responses - but already it had felt _easier_ , the release of charge finding the path of least resistance through his circuitry like water cutting a channel in stone. His emotional regulation module had eagerly taken note that _this earns me Galvatron's praise_ and was contributing edits accordingly, trimming back failsafes and tweaking decision weighting protocols, making it subtly more likely that he would have the same reaction another time to the same stimulus.

All of which was to say... "I - I think so, my lord." His tensor cables slackened and he relaxed, thinking aloud as his mind cleared enough to let him think at all. "As I understand it, Cybertronian frames have designated capacitors that overload under stimulus as a source of pleasure, and to define an exit condition for the interface process. The sensory stimulation sets up an activation call to the engines, the capacitors fill, then when they empty it closes out that instance of the protocol and the subject can either unload or re-initialise it. But without the function-limited hardware, I think in my systems the protocols have adapted to just overload everything."

He sighed quietly. "Also - my lord - I'm doing this with _you_. I don't know that mere auxiliary pleasure-systems would _cope_."

Galvatron's chuckle at that was almost a purr, and his fields - thick with charge now in their turn - pulsed hot and bright. "Well, at least you seem to enjoy it!"

Cyclonus let slip a quiet moan as that glorious warmth washed over him. He _had_ enjoyed it, yes - the shock of release snapping down his spinal power conduits, the delicious, almost torturous frisson of static discharge rising through his seams and licking over his armour - but the physical pleasure felt like no more than a subroutine to the spark-deep joy of this sudden, undreamed-of intimacy between him and his lord. After all, he suspected that any hand, with sufficient skill, might be able to tear that physical response from him whether he desired it or no. Such were the risks of hardwired somatic feedback, just as pain could incapacitate a warrior no matter how desperate he might be to fight on.

But no other hand could have made him willingly _surrender_ as he had. Adoration flashed in his spark, bright as starlight along the edges of wings in the night of space. _Galvatron-!_

"I enjoy _you_ doing this to me, my lord," he answered out loud. His voice was low, hesitant with something that felt too sweet by far to call shame. "But I swear to you, I - I won't let this become a weakness.

"I belong to you. I want this from your hands, at your pleasure, or not at all."

He felt the surprise in Galvatron's fields - and then the surge of pride and possessiveness and _approval_ that burned it away like a solar flare. Galvatron's hands tightened, gripping him until hull integrity warnings flickered in the corners of his vision; Galvatron's engines revved ferociously, the sudden roar of power shaking Cyclonus's frame and heating the charge-thick air.

" _Cyclonus,_ " Galvatron growled, as though laying claim to the sum of his being with that single word. And then, as if his hands alone weren't enough to satisfy the need to _hold_ , he bent his head and bit into the back of Cyclonus's neck.

" _Nnh-!_ "

Cyclonus's construction was such that the flexmetal that covered the back of his spinal strut and let him turn his head was forever inaccessible, covered by the tip of his cockpit canopy where it rose behind the rim of his helm. In consequence Galvatron's bite landed _there_ , across the ridge of his cockpit's centreline, sharp dentae piercing through armour and tearing the dermal circuitry beneath. Cyclonus's tensor cables clenched. Pain flashed through him, bright as fire; but just as when Galvatron had seized his throat on the bridge, it felt _right_. He cried out, his processors briefly stalling on a torrent of extremely urgent code edits: _this pain is good pain, this is my lord claiming me as his, this is to be welcomed always and always-!_

Reroute _that_ through his pleasure centres, then; connect _this_ sensation to that insidious skein of Unicron-corrupted code that was meant to make him lust for others' pain. Let him lust for his own pain too, so long as it be Galvatron's hand inflicting it-! He was whimpering, he realised, ecstatic, shameless. His lockdowns were a distant memory. All his emotions must be laid bare in his fields for Galvatron to read; and Galvatron growled and tightened his bite and _licked_ at the crumpled metal in the grip of his dentae, teasing torn and glitching sensornets, and it was incomprehensibly exquisite. " _Oh!_ Galvatron, mighty one - my lord, _please!_ "

He couldn't have explained what he was asking for. All of this was too new; he was besieged by sensations and experiences he had never imagined before today, and logic suggested that where a dozen surprises had already been forthcoming, more probably awaited. But if anything, that in itself _was_ what he wanted. To know more, to _feel_ more; to learn what other secrets his creator had buried beneath his armour, so he could dig them out and _use_ them.

Or so that Galvatron could use them _on_ him, as the case might be. He arched his back, pushing into Galvatron's grip and his bite and the glorious weight and heat of him, sensornets alight with consuming pleasure. There were no words for this, for how it felt, for how much he ached for more of it. It was as if some overlooked gauge on his internal dashboard had been reading _empty_ all his life; and now, finally, he had found out what it measured, and the needle was trembling gratefully upward with every caress he received.

Of course, if it was like most of his other gauges, it wouldn't top out any time soon. But, unlike everything else he was running on a tenth of a tank of, _this_ didn't appear to be rationed. There was no hint that Galvatron was tiring of having Cyclonus in his grasp like this - the Herald's aura was dripping with charge and its bright, flaring patterns were emphatic in their projection of reassurance and approval _._ He moaned again, relaxing with a shudder as Galvatron let go of his canopy at last and moved up over him a little further to lick and mouth at the nearer side of his helm.

His helm's twin crests were not mere ornaments, but part of his transform. In his altmode they folded in either side of his prow, joining to his nosecone. They also held his lasers, miniaturised in root mode and locked into nonfunctionality, but still _there_ beneath a comparatively light shell of armour - and now also beneath Galvatron's mouth, as the Herald's glossa teased the seam that in Cyclonus's altmode would split open to deploy his starboard cannon. Cyclonus shivered deliciously, a choked sound escaping him. Galvatron's touch on his control yoke had _fired_ that gun once upon a time, had used that very part of him to rain down ruin on their shared enemies. To have his lord touch him there _now_ , lavishing pleasure on a piece of him whose foremost purpose was to destroy, felt like the most precious of gifts.

Even more so, when it was Galvatron's _mouth_ that touched him. A touch with the hand could mean many things in the lexicon of wordless communication, from the significant to the trivial; but a touch with the lips, or glossa... that was another matter. To use the mouth for touch muffled the vocaliser, and thus Cybertronians, like many races, recognised the kiss as an act of reverence: silencing oneself, however briefly, to pay homage to another. But for a warbuild whose dentae were sharp enough to tear through steel - as Galvatron's _so very much were_ , the sweet lingering ache in Cyclonus's canopy-tip bore witness - a touch with the mouth could be an act of domination, of violence, of _hunger_...

Devotion, or devouring - or, in extremis, maybe both. Perhaps it made sense, at least for them, that hunger _was_ a kind of adoration. But no bite was forthcoming this time; only the sensuous caress of glossa as Galvatron lapped at the flickers of charge in his seams, taking only the lightest teasing taste of him, seemingly as much for his pleasure as for Galvatron's own. He moaned softly, gratitude flooding his fields, and heard Galvatron let out a half-smothered laugh, seemingly delighted yet again at his reaction.

His right hand was close by his face, its fingers bound in the entangling grip of the leadvelvet blanket that he had clutched onto in his earlier pleasure. There was no need for him to be any further restrained than he had already accidentally made himself. Thus, he was caught by surprise when Galvatron reached down beside him and gripped his wrist, pinning him to the berth on what seemed a mere whim.

Still, surprise or no, his coding knew exactly what to make of it. Restrained, _controlled_ , unable to move save at Galvatron's direction-? that was familiar, that was _good_ , he had whole sections of his core programming devoted to _that_. Hardwired protocols tried to run and were forced to abort in the absence of Galvatron's counterpart programs that should have met and engaged with them; the result was a brief, partial metaprocessor crash, a rush of dizziness like falling and a burst of silver-heat static in his cranial space that radiated down through his cockpit and across the planes of his wings. His neural nets lit up in a flare of dazed longing. _My lord, oh, my lord-!_

He was barely conscious of what he was doing, much less of the intersection of two half-executed thoughts that had prompted it, when he craned his neck and pressed his lips reverently to the side of Galvatron's hand where it lay atop his own.

Charge arced to his mouth, flashed silver-and-gold in his optics; his vision briefly whited out before his filters reset. The energies layered so thick in Galvatron's aura and clinging to his armour scorched like solar radiation, stamped with Galvatron's unique, overwhelming presence and the familiar, impossible, _how is he still alive_ burn of plasma-contamination seeping through the Herald's armour. As if that wasn't enough, he'd leaned in close to Galvatron's right hand and thus by extension to the cannon on the back of that hand's gauntlet; the energy fields around the great weapon crackled with power, enough to briefly glitch his processors again with interference-static. Galvatron startled, turning his wrist as he moved, and Cyclonus shivered in half-fearful delight as the cannon's heat-shadow fell glowing-dark across him like the echo of ruin.

But Galvatron didn't pull his hand _away_ , and so Cyclonus didn't draw back. He dimmed his optics, focused only on what his lips touched. Violet metal, hot and charged, sleek cerametallic glaze over bright paint and heavy steel; the dark taste of oil on the tiny, precisely articulated plates in the fingerjoints that slid and lapped over each other to let the joints flex while keeping them sealed. The thrum of microgears and the musical creak of taut tensor cables, the deep resonance of living machinery against the sensitive flexmetal of his mouth, the effortless strength that pinned him with a grip he couldn't have begun to break away from even had he ever desired to...

_Galvatron's hand_. The hand that broke the backs of empires, that wore the death of worlds on its wrist as lightly as a bracelet. The hand that had guided his flight and fired his guns, directed him and disciplined him and now deigned to reward him with all _this-!_

"Cyclonus?"

There was perplexity in Galvatron's tone, but no anger. It was still enough to pull him back to himself and make him blink and look up. "-my lord?"

Galvatron shifted his weight and looked down. His optics' light sketched his features in crimson, the points of his crown stood black against the haze of stars beyond the crystal roof, and Cyclonus's spark ached at how magnificent he was. "Cyclonus... what was _that_ for?"

The words might easily have been a threat. Galvatron had a terrifying knack of deploying a reasonable-seeming question like a landmine and letting a hapless subordinate step on it. But Cyclonus knew how to spot those traps, knew how his lord's voice and fields went taut when he was setting them, and there was none of that here. Galvatron's voice was pitched high but only in question, not the dangerous singsong that meant his temper was about to snap free of its restraints. His fields were still bright and open, his curiosity seemingly genuine, and his ever-expressive mouth quirked in a lopsided smile.

It made it easier to find the right words to reply. "Because you deserve to be worshipped, mighty Galvatron. And..." To his own surprise a breath of a self-deprecating laugh slipped its way free of his vocaliser, mirroring that teasing little half-grin on Galvatron's lips. "From here, that, ah... that was the best I could do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick credit goes on this chapter to [Severiner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severiner), who a few chapters ago asked about first kisses and sent me off thinking about what kissing would even mean to alien war machines anyway. Thank you for the inspiration!


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Cyclonus has a few ideas of his own and would like to try them out - assuming, of course, that Galvatron is willing to let him. Content notes: tactile interfacing, chain-of-command dynamics and associated D/s, eroticisation of violence, weapon kink/worship. Nothing too rough, still all consensual.

_Because you deserve to be worshipped..._

On the face of it, Galvatron thought, that was a simple statement of fact. He was well aware of his power and the nature of its source: he was the dark counterpart to the bearer of the Matrix, forged with Unicron's divinity smelted into his metal and branded in his spark. He was entitled not merely to the honour due a ruler, but the reverence owed to a demigod. Of course Cyclonus, created with him and _for_ him, knew that!

And yet it was very obvious to Galvatron in that moment that Cyclonus wasn't _talking_ about that. Cyclonus knew he had neither the time nor the inclination to hold still for tedious spiritual formalities. And gods, even the darkest, weren't worshipped with heated lips that clung to their armour, with wordless little moans or the molten pulse of want-slick fields... no. It was _Galvatron himself_ that Cyclonus sought to adore.

The abstract divinity manifested in him had nothing to do with it at all.

Somewhere deep in his spark, Galvatron's pride slitted its optics and _purred_. He pushed a surge of that pride hot and hungry into his fields; caressing Cyclonus with it, rewarding him yet again. "Then if I let you up," he prompted, half-teasing in answer to Cyclonus's tone, "how do you propose to do better?!"

The warrior's optics sharpened thoughtfully, and Galvatron privately exulted. _That_ was his Cyclonus that he saw in that look-! behind that contemplative crimson glint he recognised his trusted strategist and second-in-command in full measure, and the sight gave him a keen satisfaction. Cyclonus dazed with hardcoded submission and utterly pliant to his will was exquisite, _yes;_ but Cyclonus with all his ruthless wits fully about him, alert and engaged, and _still_ eager to be here and serve him so intimately?

That prospect was almost _better_. "Well?!" he prompted, playfully impatient when he didn't receive an immediate reply. Cyclonus was welcome to _think_ , yes, but he at least owed Galvatron regular updates on the process!

"That would depend greatly on what you told me would please you, my lord," Cyclonus murmured at last. He lowered his gaze deferentially, as close as he could come to a bow with Galvatron's weight flattening his frame to the berth. "But I _feel_ at least as though I should be doing _something_."

A fractional smile touched his lips. "I admit I may be overthinking this. But - I belong to you, mighty Galvatron. How would you have me prove it?"

Galvatron blinked, and then had to laugh. "As if you hadn't proven it already!" He released his grip on Cyclonus's wrist, sitting up to let him move - and despite everything they had already done, he still caught a brief, sharp pang of wistful _loss_ in Cyclonus's fields as he was set free.

His own spark echoed it, if only a little. Holding Cyclonus beneath him, having his warrior _exactly where he belonged,_ had been nothing short of addictive. Still! He could reclaim his grasp any time he wanted. And as for the current question...

He looked down, holding Cyclonus's gaze, and, reaching out his right hand, placed two fingertips to his mouth. "Go on, then," he urged, smiling. "Prove it again!"

" _Mm_ _h-!_ "

Cyclonus's optics guttered almost black for a moment - but he never looked away! - and then half-closed as he let out that small, ecstatic sound. He parted his lips without hesitation to let Galvatron's fingers slide into his mouth, and...

_You deserve to be worshipped,_ Cyclonus had said, and that was unquestionably what this was. The sharp edges of his dentae never scratched Galvatron's paint; there was only soft flexmetal and the caress of his glossa, its tip delicately tracing the seams of Galvatron's finger joints. _Such a small thing,_ Galvatron thought. Almost inconsequential, in itself.

And yet so _intense._ Feedback flashed up his neural nets, tingling all through his wrist and forearm. His tensor cables tightened involuntarily, the creak of iron sinews loud in the air. "Cyclonus-!" he gasped, and Cyclonus visibly shivered. The only reply that escaped him out loud was a sparkfelt moan.

Over radio, he was decidedly more coherent. //My lord?//

// _Good,_ // Galvatron reassured him, switching to radio in turn. The intimacy of it seemed fitting to the moment. //Go on!//

// _Mmm_... gladly, mighty Galvatron.//

His voice was low and husky now, his fields dripping with pleasure. Not the ragged, helpless joy and need he had offered up under Galvatron's earlier touches, but something almost _wanton_ , edged with a silvery flush of pride that bloomed brighter at hearing himself praised. The muffled noise that slipped from his vocaliser was one of pure contentment.

The sound and sensation and the _sight_ of his precious lieutenant stretched before him and _worshipping_ him - just as promised! - sent heat coiling up Galvatron's spinal struts. _Another_ secret side of his warrior, revealed for him and him alone...

Although when he considered it, perhaps this one had been hiding in plain sight. Cyclonus's mission discipline was, after all, unmatched. He was never more satisfied than when he was given a task and could do it well. Clearly this particular objective was both within his capacities and very much to his taste.

In the most literal sense, even, to judge by the fervour with which he was devoting himself to it. His glossa worked its way over Galvatron's fingers, its tip pressing into each joint and seam, leaving a trail of tingling warmth through Galvatron's sensornets in its wake. And when it flickered against the tactile pads in his fingertips... Galvatron shuddered, reaching out with his free hand to stroke Cyclonus's wing by way of reward. _Yes, good!_

Perhaps there was something more he could give his lieutenant, too. Beneath those pads, with their layered sensors, were the embedded microgenerators that were part of _their_ interface systems, their custom touch-tech of electrostatic signals and wireless data transfer. Galvatron could convey orders and feedback to the _Dis_ or _Charon_ \- or, most pertinently, to _Cyclonus!_ \- with nothing more than a caress to their console touchpads and a ripple of modulated charge.

He wondered gleefully, as he activated the generators in those two fingertips now, what _give me control_ would taste like.

Cyclonus's reaction, at any rate, was exquisite. He let out a high, startled sound that was stifled in the next second as he sucked on Galvatron's fingers, eagerly drawing them deeper into his mouth. His fields sparkled crystalline-bright with a burst of surprise and gratitude and _want,_ and he shuttered his optics and moaned in delight. Still he didn't pause in his worship; if anything, his caresses grew more fervent than ever. He even reached up - cautiously, respectfully - to lay his right hand on the side of Galvatron's gauntlet. //My lord - may I? Please...//

//You may!// Galvatron turned up the intensity of that fingertip static-pulse, abandoning the pretence of sending messages in favour of simply pouring unmodulated charge into Cyclonus's throat. If he wanted it, let him have it!

Cyclonus most definitely did want it, to judge by his answering moan. Devotion burned bright in his aura, and Galvatron basked in it as he watched and _felt_ the slow, reverent slide of Cyclonus's hand up his forearm. It was strange, really, for him to find that caress so deeply _acceptable._ Most of the time, he distrusted any touch to his frame outside of combat.

But this was _Cyclonus,_ so loyal, so very much _his._ Cyclonus, who wanted nothing more than to be permitted to serve and please, except perhaps to be rewarded for it however Galvatron saw fit. // _Mine,_ // he murmured, barely thinking as he spoke. It was the obvious thing to say, the one and only word that captured everything between them that mattered.

Obvious or not, Cyclonus shivered as though he had just received some sort of spark-level override command. His fields all but melted into Galvatron's stronger ones, synchronising and _sinking_ into them; the pulse of emotion that radiated from him was a blend of devotion and quiet pride, framed by pure, untarnished happiness. // _Yours,_ mighty Galvatron,// he breathed.

And as he answered, the soft words ringing with the weight of a lifetime oath, he slid his hand up to press it - reverently beyond measure! - to the armoured base of Galvatron's cannon.

Galvatron froze. His cannon was not merely _his_ , it was _him_ \- the outward, permanent show of what he _was_ in his deepest spark. When he transformed, it was _all_ of him; but even in his root mode it was the source and symbol of his authority, the first and final answer to any challenge offered to him. His whole frame was built around it: his power management systems and engine gearing ratios, the asymmetric servos that compensated for its off-centre weight, the artillery-specific seismic and terrain mapping senses that no normal mech possessed. His vision was etched in crosshairs and target locks, his private inner language structured by the algorithms of vector and range and trajectory calculations. His first inevitable thought, no matter where his gaze turned, was and always would be: _how would I destroy that?_

And that, in turn, was what made _I would never destroy that_ such a precious, potent thought on the rare occasions that something worthy of it fell into his grasp. _Cyclonus_ deserved that thought; all the more so because he _knew_ how Galvatron's mind worked, and still put himself freely at Galvatron's mercy. Cyclonus fully understood that Galvatron not only _could_ destroy him, but at any given moment would have the calculations on hand for _how_ to.

Yet he somehow deleted that knowledge from his assessment of personal risk. He treated his own life as expendable at Galvatron's discretion and didn't even seem to resent the idea... and now he had his hand on Galvatron's great weapon, _caressing_ it. Worshipping the very power that could end him in a sparkpulse.

_If_ Galvatron chose.

Which Galvatron did _not_.

" _Cyclonus...!_ "

He'd spoken out loud, the sound of his own voice startling him as it cut through the heavy quiet of low-revving engines and muted capacitor whine. Cyclonus's optics flashed in a blink, and his gaze instantly sharpened and turned toward his lord's face. He let Galvatron's fingers slip from his mouth, but only to catch them in his free hand.

"Mighty Galvatron?"

His voice was low, deferential, as ready as he would have been on a battlefield to obey without question. His aura glowed with banked silver heat; his right hand still rested, fearless, on Galvatron's cannon. Galvatron looked into his optics, and saw nothing there but trust.

It was hardly an emotion Galvatron himself had been given much cause to invest in. Betrayed by his creator from the moment of his forging, sabotaged by his so-called followers, tricked by his enemies - his short existence so far had been a non-stop gauntlet of deception stacked upon treachery. Who or what, in all the galaxy, had done anything to earn _his_ trust?!

...well. There was the _Dis,_ which had never done anything but serve him to the limit of its capacities, its shadowy will forever aligned with his. And there was Cyclonus.

Cyclonus who had flown for him, fought for him. Cyclonus who had come to _find_ him at unthinkable risk, even when presented with a perfect opportunity to seize power to himself. Cyclonus who repeatedly accepted the army's clandestine mockery as the price of his public fealty to Galvatron, who questioned no order unless it was to ask _is there more I can do?_ Cyclonus who had willingly offered himself up to be _broken,_ sacrificed dignity and pride and exposed every weakness he had, who had dared all Galvatron's power and wrath for - what?

For nothing more than the want to be closer. Nothing but the hope that his lord might somehow take pleasure in him. Galvatron's spark flared at that thought. He wanted - he didn't _know_ what he wanted, all the impulses that seized him too inchoate to make sense of. But Cyclonus should be pulled to him, grasped and claimed and _rewarded_ somehow... and it had taken him mere microseconds to run through all of those thoughts and Cyclonus was still holding his gaze, _waiting_ for his consent or command, standing by for orders with that look of loyal certainty in his optics.

So be it. Perhaps the best reward he ever _could_ give his lieutenant was yet another chance to serve. " _Go on!_ "

"My lord," Cyclonus breathed, and bowed his head to kiss Galvatron's fingers as his right hand slipped higher.

Galvatron's cannon was as massively armoured as the rest of him, its tactile sensors buried deep beneath shielding and heavy plate. But Cyclonus - of course - _knew_ that, and had the wit to press hard and pour charge through his fingertips to set silver-bright static glittering wherever they touched. Startled, _delighted,_ Galvatron shuddered, his engines revving roughly as Cyclonus's touch coaxed his sensornets alight.

He would never have expected any of this to feel so good.

Logically, that was absurd. His neural wiring was built on the same templates as Cyclonus's, and he had seen and _felt_ what his touch had done to his warrior. Still, he realised, somehow he had assumed - until today! - that _his_ frame, tempered in high-density plasma and scarred clear to the struts, would have long since lost the responsiveness to appreciate anything so subtle as a mere hand on his plating. If he had ever thought about it before now he might even have supposed the relevant pathways severed altogether, overwritten and destroyed when Unicron had carved pain into his spark and metal as punishment for his defiance.

Apparently not. He arched his back, a _noise_ escaping through his gritted dentae as Cyclonus's hand smoothed so carefully, so attentively over the fairing plates that covered his plasma coil array. It might have felt like a challenge to have this done to him, that someone should dare to _surprise_ him with his own sensornets! - but, again, _this was Cyclonus_. Cyclonus who adored him, who had promised him _worship_ and was making good on that promise with every devoted touch...

He shuddered again as static sizzled in the complex of reinforced circuits that ran through his gauntlet and cannon. He had far more and heavier power conduits in his right arm than his left, and all that extra capacity meant extra potential for feedback and localised charge buildup. Autonomic control systems reacted to his heightened arousal, pushing his engines to spin up and pour more charge into his main capacitor banks, filling him with an intoxicating rush of strength. Power ready and waiting and wanting to be _used,_ heat that drove back hunger-chill and dark memories alike-! " _Mmmh..._ yes, Cyclonus, _good..._ more!"

Cyclonus's fields telegraphed a sharp, bright burst of joy and _hunger_ at that. "As you will, mighty Galvatron," he murmured, briefly raising his head from mouthing at Galvatron's fingers.

Only to instead press his lips, in the next moment, to the barrel of the cannon.

" _Hhh-!!_ "

_That_ was worship. That was devotion, beyond any thought of fear; that was the same trust that let Cyclonus open his cockpit and turn over his flight controls, that brought him back and back to Galvatron's side with the inevitability of a solar orbit. That was _perfect._

And even that was to say nothing of the picture Cyclonus made as he did it. His stealth paint had shifted to midnight indigo in the recharge room's shadows, his optics were dimmed crimson-dark and their glow reflected like the fires of battle in the burnished curve of Galvatron's cannon. His wings were black blades in silhouette, his proud crests dipped like weapons at salute as he bowed his head to serve.

He was _beautiful._ And he was _Galvatron's,_ by forging and coding and a third time of asking _by his own free choice,_ and no amount of pleasure could have distracted Galvatron from that thought as it burned itself into his spark. He knelt up - a quick, forceful shift of his position, but taking the utmost care not to wrench his hand from Cyclonus's clasp on it. "Come _here!_ " he growled, and with his left hand reached and pulled Cyclonus up and _to_ him.

Cyclonus went; unresisting, _of course,_ all but falling into his grip. His fields spilled _devotion, greeting, gratitude_ as he settled eagerly against Galvatron's chestplate, somehow retaining the coordination to continue what he was doing. Kissing and licking the barrel of Galvatron's cannon, clinging to his hand; reaching up with his other hand, to touch and stroke over armour that was almost glowing-hot with the power that pulsed beneath it.

Galvatron crushed him close, his fingers curling in an iron grasp as fire bloomed up the length of his spinal struts. His capacitors were _full,_ as he never remembered feeling them even before his creator's fall. Heat and power surged through his every last circuit, reinforced by Cyclonus's aura-charge washing over his armour. His relay interlocks felt _tight,_ the unfamiliar sensation at once uncomfortable and strangely satisfying just for what it implied; and a system alert he knew he had never seen before in his life flashed in his optical display, briefly interrupting the eternal shimmer of target locks hunting across his vision. _Full charge, 100% of base capacitance; systems overload imminent-_

_Let them,_ he thought, just as he had enjoined Cyclonus in the same predicament on the bridge - had that really been barely an hour ago? had they not been doing this all their lifetimes?! - and snapped his interlocks off.

Charge, _pleasure,_ exploded through his systems, rolling like the spread of flame through a detonating target. His grip tightened with crushing force; through the white roar of static in his audial pickups he heard Cyclonus cry out, but his fields pulsed _joy_ and _pleasure_ so Galvatron clearly hadn't done any damage to him that he didn't like. The shadows around them were dispelled in a blaze of red-golden light as arcs of Galvatron's released charge flashed to ground on the recharge room's walls-

-and on Cyclonus, who shuddered and clung to him and overloaded _again_ with a ragged keen of pleasure. His energies flared in turn, pouring over Galvatron's armour, power surging back and forth between their frames. So much charge that neither of them could hold it alone, so it spilled like blood, like wine, to drench them both.

It was a false feast, and even in the moment Galvatron knew as much. They would both pay for this in empty tanks and cold circuits soon enough; even he, with his plasma overcharge to enhance his natural strength, wasn't immune to the pain of low-fuel warnings. But for one glorious moment it _felt_ like having power to burn.

Like having _enough._

Even, perhaps, so much that they could afford to _waste_ it. He could taste his lieutenant's energy-print as he licked his lips, could feel it soaking into his circuitry along with the field-pulses of helpless ecstasy that Cyclonus was pouring out for him. And presumably Cyclonus could feel _him_ the same way, as close to _joined_ as they could be outside their pilot-bond...

He pressed Cyclonus close in his arms as the storm of power around them finally began to die, and _did not let go._

Silence fell, a thick, charged silence of heated air and lingering static, underscored more than broken by the whine of strained cooling systems and the thrum of engines spinning down. Cyclonus, his optics darkened, turned his head - with visible effort - and kissed the top of Galvatron's chestplate where his lips happened to touch, before settling loose-jointed and exhausted against his lord's shoulder. He radiated quiet happiness on every frequency Galvatron could monitor him in.

Pleased, Galvatron stroked his helm more gently than might have ordinarily occurred to him. "Well done, Cyclonus," he murmured.

"Mmm... thank you, mighty Galvatron."

He didn't specify for what, so Galvatron chose to assume he meant _everything_. The praise, the caress, the chance to serve... or, for that matter, for the brief power boost of Galvatron's charge soaking into his circuitry. Regardless, he was in no mood to be ungracious. "Hmh - my pleasure!" he replied, with a chuckle at the accidental twofold meaning. _Pleasure_ there had certainly been in abundance there, for both of them.

_Well._ He felt confident in saying that whatever combination of Primus's sentiment and Unicron's spite had ended up in their configurations, the results were eminently satisfactory. He petted Cyclonus idly, enjoying the lingering warmth of aligned fields between them boosted by the recharge circuitry in the floor. The _Dis'_ watchful, silent presence in the walls filtered back into his awareness, like a shadow embracing them. _Secret, safe..._

"Mighty Galvatron?" Cyclonus ventured, quietly.

He had never felt more disposed to be indulgent. "Hmm, Cyclonus?"

"I know you said I was only to do this with you, but - what about Scourge?"

"What about him?"

"He _is_ our wingmate, my lord. His coding most likely matches ours, and with his sensory abilities... he might have his own contributions to make. Should he be allowed to - enjoy this, too?"

Galvatron blinked, but accepted the question. He _had_ said on the bridge that Cyclonus was to yield like this only to him, but that had been a first impulse, the instinct to keep his grip on what was _his_ in the face of new and unknown circumstances. Now, armed with both experience and an explanation, he could reconsider. Cyclonus's point was sound - Scourge was their wing-third, built on their shared templates, his abilities purposely distributed to complement theirs. He belonged to Galvatron no less than Cyclonus did!

And it did feel as though _something_ was still missing from the web of energies now woven through the air around them. Was it as simple as that, that this secret protocol was really configured for all three of them? Would Scourge be as easy to toy with as Cyclonus, his shadow-dark energies as sweet to soak up?

He was abruptly eager to find out. "Do you think he'd want to?"

"I - think he might be curious, my lord."

Cyclonus's tone was suspiciously nonchalant. Galvatron grinned. "All right, then call him up here and let's ask him!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this chapter really fought me every step of the way. Still, here we are. Thank you to everyone still reading and I hope the new year is treating you all kindly. <3


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Scourge isn't having a good day. Then again, is he ever? Content notes: mostly Scourge feeling sorry for himself, although arguably with good reason.

Scourge, for once in his life, was trying not to look.

Being suddenly placed in charge of the post-battle cleanup had been a surprise but he thought he'd handled it passably well, though there were sure to be things Cyclonus would point out later that he could have done better. Most of the army had been content to be dismissed with a token round of victory energon and had gone to knock out their dents, engage in mutual debrief-by-bragging, and either drink or gamble their extra rations. He'd assigned a couple of Sweeps, Astrotrain, Blast Off and the Constructicons to recover salvage from the orbital battlefield and the various places where bits of debris had hit Charr, though admittedly not without misgivings. He didn't trust Astrotrain but the triple-changer was the biggest aerial cargo hauler they had. Blast Off was reliable enough, but assigning him to a salvage mission meant risking _Swindle_ getting near a salvage mission, which was the kind of unforced error even a Dinobot would laugh at you for. He'd tried to hedge his bets by telling Onslaught and the other two Combaticons to keep Swindle occupied for a while, which... seemed to be happening, but was another item on the list of things he wasn't looking at.

Though compared to what was currently at the top of that list, it barely registered. He peered up towards the _Dis_ again, then shook himself sharply and snapped his ranged-sight away to stare instead into the fuzzy white neutron void of Charr's dying sun. The endless static of billions of slowly-dissolving atoms was a blank slate, in terms of meaningful data, but concentrating on it blocked out any other visuals that might otherwise have reached him. Sadly, it didn't do anything about his imagination.

Or his memory. He'd watched Cyclonus to the _Dis_ because anyone who passed up the chance to watch Cyclonus fly anywhere was an idiot, but also because he was Cyclonus's _wingmate_. He was _supposed_ to know where Cyclonus was and whether he'd gotten there safely. He'd watched Cyclonus enter the bridge and talk to Galvatron because... well, mostly because he'd been looking already and nether of them had told him to stop. _Looking_ was, after all, his default setting. Anyone who didn't like that about him could go take it up with Unicron.

And after that he'd watched because he couldn't look away.

He'd never expected to see Cyclonus _break_ like that. He hadn't thought Galvatron had it in him, before _or_ since Thrull, to be so merciful in response. He certainly hadn't imagined that all his recent research would end up hijacked, deconstructed and rebuilt from first principles just so his wingmates could do _that._

He tried to break the thread of his thoughts before they pulled him into places he shouldn't go. He was only the tracker, the watcher in the dark, and just because he saw everything didn't mean any of it was _for_ him. That was what being a surveillance specialist _meant:_ knowing everything you could about things you weren't supposed to be invited to. It was, despite his tactile sensory abilities being on a par with all his others, fundamentally a hands-off job.

The opposite of Cyclonus, then, who had been designed with the most hands-on job it was possible to have. Cyclonus was Galvatron's personal fighter craft, built to be touched, his systems close-integrated with Galvatron's all the way from his frame design clear through to his code. No wonder he'd blatantly liked it so much when Galvatron had...

He caught himself again. That did _not_ qualify as stopping thinking about it.

//Commander Scourge? Do you know what Galvatron and Cyclonus are doing?//

And _that_ was Sweep One, with the innocent, insatiable curiosity of their kind, sticking a claw in _right_ where it hurt. //That's alpha-black classified and none of your business,// he growled. //Didn't I give you something to do?//

Sweep One let out a guilty squeak. //Uh, yes sir. Sorry, commander.//

Scourge sighed and turned his attention to the Sweeps' intra-wing channel, the one that both he and they pretended he didn't monitor. The conversation there rapidly had him tuning back out again, though he stayed long enough to confirm that his code-alpha-black warning had been passed on. Trying to entirely stop the Sweeps from discussing anything they found interesting was futile, but at least they knew not to do it in audialshot of the other Decepticons now.

He was no better than they were anyway, he privately admitted to himself as his gaze tracked back inexorably to the _Dis_ and the events currently transpiring in the recharge room. _Not looking_ just wasn't working, not when he had the option of watching _that_.

So much for Cyclonus's earlier disdain for this whole idea. Then again, Cyclonus changing his mind about something on Galvatron's account was hardly out of the way. And Cyclonus changing his mind in return for Galvatron pinning him down and touching him and whispering things in his audials that Scourge _absolutely should not be listening to_ but the temptation was too much... No, nothing about this was in any way a surprise, and it was his own problem if knowing about it was making his engines stutter and static prickle over his wings. Cyclonus _belonged_ to Galvatron and didn't make much of a secret of the fact that he liked it that way. Of course he'd do anything for Galvatron, and of course Galvatron wouldn't share. Why should he?

He glanced upwards again, painful and yet irresistible as it was, only to find that they'd changed positions and now Cyclonus was preoccupied with a mouthful of Galvatron's fingers _._ The sensornets of Scourge's claws crackled painfully with empathic, envious feedback, and he flinched and clenched them until they scraped silver lines in his palms. Galvatron looked so _pleased,_ and Cyclonus was so beautiful and somehow still holding onto his pride even as he bent his head over Galvatron's hand with his fields dripping desire and surrender - and no, never in a million years was Scourge going to get a share in that. He wasn't sure he would be able to handle it even if the chance did somehow come his way.

He looked away yet again, too resigned to even feel all that bitter. It was fair enough. What did he have to offer by comparison to Cyclonus, let alone to _Galvatron?_ About the best result he could see himself getting out of this situation was that if he could pointedly remind Cyclonus who had figured all this out for him in the first place, then Cyclonus might at least agree to owe him a favour. Not, of course, that it would be the kind of favour that involved fingers in mouths or hands on wings, but it would still be something.

Besides, if doing _that_ with Galvatron made Cyclonus as blissfully content as it looked like it did, maybe the jetwarrior would be a little less locked-down and guarded the rest of the time. Scourge would settle for that. He could make himself watch from the sidelines forever, swallow the tight-hollow feeling in his throat and ignore the ache under his lasercore shields, and never say a word. He'd keep his wingmates' secrets, just as he was built to do, if it would get him an occasional smile and a taste or two of the way Cyclonus's fields softened to silver velvet when he was in a good mood...

...much as they were doing now, as Cyclonus _stroked Galvatron's cannon_ like he'd been forged without the capacity for fear. Pleasure and devotion blazed from him like a beacon and Scourge stretched his perceptions, stubbornly ignoring the speed with which his energy reserves were depleting. Reading fields at orbital range wasn't outside his capabilities, but it took more power and more focus than his underfuelled, battle-fatigued frame really had to spare.

It was also exactly the wrong set of sensory gain to have dialled up to maximum when Galvatron's aura suddenly blew up like a supernova.

Scourge yelped out loud, and was grateful nobody had been standing near him to hear. Pain stabbed blinding through the front of his cranial module and he instinctively covered his face with his claws, furling his wings over his head to invoke the heavyweight sensory shielding built into them for just such emergencies - too late, of course. The blaze of golden flame that had briefly eclipsed both Galvatron and Cyclonus was already stamped on his circuitry like the ghosts burned into a monitor left on one picture for too long. The psychic afterimage scorched his processors until he managed to scrub it away in a cascade of frantic resets. " _Ow..._ void _dammit..._ "

Well, that was what eavesdropping got him, then. He made a mental note that next time he'd better watch with a few more autofilters pre-loaded. He'd seen Cyclonus overload earlier - and hadn't _that_ been something - but it hadn't occurred to him that _Galvatron_ would.

It hadn't entirely occurred to him that Galvatron _could_. Now, too late, it was obvious that _if_ Galvatron's systems could flash over then the localised impact of it would rival a fully charged blast from his cannon, and Scourge was the last mech who should have been caught unprepared for _that_. He waited another moment and then, with his ranged-sight and extended EM scanners temporarily disabled, carefully lowered his wings back to their rest stance and focused on nothing but the dark, empty, harmless patch of Charr's ruins directly below him where he perched on the base roof. _There._ A slow count of twenty while everything cycled and rebooted, and then-

And of course, because Scourge was the one of them with Unicron's own personal burden of luck, it was at that moment that his radio clicked and scared the life out of him.

//Scourge?//

 _Cyclonus._ His startle reflexes tried to dump a fresh dose of mechadrenaline into his already overstressed systems and he only partially managed to interrupt them. //I wasn't doing anything!// was what somehow escaped him in default of any more appropriate reply.

His wingmate let out a snort that sounded suspiciously like a half-suppressed laugh. //In that case it won't be any trouble for you to come and join us, on Galvatron's orders. We're in the recharge room on the _Dis_.//

It was surprisingly merciful of Cyclonus, he thought distantly through the sudden screed of white noise in his processors, to pretend that Scourge might not know where to find them. //Erm. I - of course.// He hesitated. //Am I in trouble?//

That was _definitely_ a laugh that time, low and almost _husky_. //Only if you _don't_ get up here.//

Scourge didn't think he'd ever heard his wingmate sound like that. Even at his most exhausted and beaten there was always strength in Cyclonus's voice and fields, but it was a scuffed, war-worn, battlefield strength, tightly leashed, grim with fatigue and determination. You could invariably hear that the steel in his spark was the foremost thing holding him together. But in his tone _now_... that was a different kind of strength entirely. That was something _sleek,_ powered-up and sure of itself. A strength that was anticipating its next challenge, rather than simply bracing for it - stars, that was Cyclonus halfway to sounding like _Galvatron_.

_Or maybe that's how he would've always sounded if we weren't in such a void-cursed mess._

//Coming,// he replied. There was no other option, of course; nonetheless, it wasn't too hard to make himself move when a significant percentage of him very much wanted to be closer to any version of Cyclonus that sounded like _that_ no matter what the attendant risks might be. He pinged a quick _carry-on-without-me_ to the Sweeps, took off, transformed, and went.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Scourge's day might be improving, but he's not sure he dares to trust it yet. (As is now established tradition for this fic, an extra chapter of not!porn has sneaked in where I didn't intend to put one, so no additional content warnings here. Back to the good stuff next time I promise.)

~~ _welcome, farseer_ ~~

The _Dis_ greeted Scourge in its usual sub-radio, half-telepathic fashion as he arrived on board it, like a whisper in his audial in an empty room. He shivered, but not unpleasantly. The warship's noospheric presence was deep and dark as the gulf of a black nebula; he could feel its vast, attenuated awareness bending protectively toward him, undisturbed and undeterred by any of the conflict currently entangling his thoughts. As ever, the _Dis_ was simply _there;_ certain of its purpose, secure in its power.

And steadfastly _on his side,_ just as it always was for all three of them. Well, at least he still knew where he stood with _someone_ around here. He laid his hand on the wall beside the flight bay door, steadying himself on the contact of cool void-violet metal and the comforting weight of the ship's thoughts resting against his. //Thanks, _Dis_.//

It was always easier for the _Dis_ to communicate when they were touching it somewhere, even if not directly on its controls. ~~ _affection_ ~~ it sent, the sentiment transmitted as a silken electrostatic ripple through the bulkhead under his palm.

Scourge managed not to let his claws twitch hard enough to scratch paint. He had been trying to suppress the over-aroused feeling in his circuitry since he took off from the base, and supportive though the _Dis'_ intentions might be, _that wasn't helping_. Nonetheless he mirrored the emotional pulse back, pressing _affection_ into his fields and into the wall at that spot for the ship to pick up. He briefly wished that all he had been summoned for was to go and take his place on the bridge, to sink into the familiar shadows of the _Dis'_ datascape and stick to what he knew he was good at.

As if his life would ever be that easy. With a last lingering touch for the _Dis_ , he slipped through the access door and hurried onwards.

***

Outside the recharge room he hesitated one more time, nervousness prickling hot-and-cold through his processors and crawling along his struts. On the one wing, Cyclonus had said he was only in trouble if he _didn't_ come up here. On the other, he hadn't said what Scourge was required here _for_.

 _Not in trouble_ didn't automatically imply orders he was going to _like_.

He adjusted his ranged-sight and peeked through the door - quite literally through it, in preference to opening it without some knowledge of what to expect on the other side. Galvatron and Cyclonus sat among the recharge floor's disarrayed padding, seemingly relaxed and at ease in each other's company despite the state they were in. Cyclonus still had the scorched wound low on his chestplate that he had taken in the earlier battle, but it had been joined by scuffs, scrapes and a few dents that Scourge's analytical modules quietly informed him were a precise match to the span of Galvatron's hands. Drying oil glistened on the jetwarrior's throat, a black-rainbow sheen coating torn flexmetal, and the tip of his cockpit where it rose behind his helm was crumpled like tinfoil. And _both_ of them had charge-burns all over their paint, fractal strike-patterns swirling up forearms and over chestplates, branching silver across Cyclonus's wings.

Neither was paying any heed to their damage, but, Scourge realised abruptly, they probably didn't _need_ to right now. The space cleared between them held a scattering of small but bright energon cubes. Each one glowed a deep, black-edged purple, instead of the usual faded shades of pink - and Scourge swallowed hard against nothing, shocked hunger knifing through his throat and settling like a painful weight in his tanks.

That was _their_ energon. As Cybertron's original, long-depleted wells and crystalline veins of energon had been infused with the shining essence of Primus, so Unicron's darkness had flavoured and corrupted the fuel that ran in _his_ lines; and just as Cybertronians received additional benefit from energon synthesised by their own creator, so Galvatron and his strikeforce had been naturally optimised to run on the Voidbringer's black blood. Dark energon enhanced their abilities, heightened their senses, boosted their power... and whetted the destructive appetites they had inherited from their maker.

Except that Unicron was _gone_. Their remaining supply of true dark energon was all the galaxy had left; the _Dis'_ converters could synthesise something close, at an astronomical cost in raw materials, but even that lacked the intoxicating power of the real thing. Their precious, irreplaceable stockpile was spread across hidden lockers all over the ship, scattered to ensure that no catastrophe could destroy all of it at once.

And so that in the unthinkable event the _Dis_ should ever be damaged or boarded, they would have their secret advantage within reach no matter where any of them were caught. So of course some of it was stored in the recharge room, but if Galvatron had authorised breaking into it _now_... Scourge shivered and licked his lips, trying to shut down his imagination before it got too excited. His claws trembled as he keyed the access panel for the doors.

When they slid aside on whisper-quiet hydraulics, he realised he still hadn't been ready for this at all. The heat that spilled from inside the room licked over his armour like a caress, but stunned him like a blow. His chemosensors registered hot metal and smoked oil and the heavy, too-sweet taste of vaporised coolant; add to that the enticing fragrance of energon drifting from the cubes on the floor and the unpatched wounds on Cyclonus's frame, and it was like stepping suddenly onto a battlefield. The air was sharp with ionisation and heavy with lingering charge, tingling on his wings.

And from the middle of it all his triadmates regarded him with optics agleam and intimidatingly matching smiles, their fields charge-slicked and merged and synchronised until even Scourge was struggling to discern the exact boundaries where silver met gold. "Ah, there you are!" Galvatron greeted him. "Come in, don't just stand there!"

Galvatron's words always had a harsh inflection, no matter what emotion he meant to put into them. His vocaliser had as much plasma-scarring as the rest of his internals. He could never wholly disguise the rasp that Thrull had left him with; at best he could only modulate it, not that he often bothered to try. In anger, especially, his voice pitched upwards to a steel-edged scream that raked at the audials - and which was, admittedly, excellently tuned for terrorising enemies and his own troops alike.

But when he was pleased or contemplative it tended to soften and deepen, and his vocal glitch faded to a husky, velvet hint of a growl. And it wasn't as though Galvatron's mood reached such peaks of positivity _often_ , but when it did, that subtle purr resonated at exactly the right frequencies to destabilise Scourge's knee joints. His armour rattled slightly before he hastily locked his servos in place. " _Er_ \- yes, mighty Galvatron. You had orders for me?"

"Not _orders_ precisely," Galvatron replied, _grinning_. "More of a question! Cyclonus tells me you were the one to find our hidden data concerning this - _elective interfacing_ phenomenon?"

 _I am a loyal subordinate who of course knows what you're talking about but had no reason to think you might bring it up here and now_ was a fairly complicated subverbal reaction, especially when part of it was a flagrant lie. Scourge really wasn't sure his face and fields were projecting it convincingly. "I - uh, yes, mighty Galvatron. That is-"

"Indeed!" Galvatron was merciful enough to cut him off before he could keep talking and make his situation any worse. "Well done, by the way. We've been doing some further research on the subject!"

 _Is that what we're calling it,_ Scourge thought, more wistful than skeptical. "Research?"

"Cyclonus had a theory that while we don't have the same hardware as the Cybertronians - _fortunately!_ \- we might still have some of the coding, albeit repurposed." Galvatron was still grinning, _gloating_ , like he was enjoying everything about this conversation up to and including watching Scourge squirm. "And it seems he was correct! Which leads me to wonder..."

He tilted his head, and Galvatron being _playful_ was its own unique kind of terrifying in Scourge's opinion, because it was so easy to _hope_ that it might end in something good at the same time as being very afraid that it wouldn't. "Do you, as well?"

" _Me?_ "

His metaprocessor came within a twitch of crashing at being asked _that_ to his face. But- _You do,_ his spark whispered. _You do, because where else did you get your greed for this, why else do your neural nets twist up every time Cyclonus's fields brush yours?_

_What else made you so unable to look away?_

"I - I don't _know_ , mighty Galvatron? That is, I mean-"

Cyclonus snorted softly, his mouth quirking, and Scourge winced at the knowledge that he wasn't fooling his wingmate in the least. And then Galvatron laughed out loud without even trying to hide it, though there was a pulse of warmth in his fields that felt an unexpectedly long way from mockery. "Oh, come, Scourge," he murmured. "We all know you were watching! The only question is, are you joining us?"

 _Am I allowed to,_ he thought to ask through the sudden crackling sensation in his processors. But somehow, all that made it out of his vocaliser was a bewildered "Am I?"


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As promised, we are back to the porn! In which Galvatron is surprisingly patient, Cyclonus discovers the concept of switching in the berth, and Scourge is totally out of his depth already. Content notes: mostly just petting and a bit of negotiation and feelings, all consensual.

"Am I?"

Scourge's optics were stunned-bright and his wings twitched nervously, and he looked utterly bewildered. Galvatron burst out laughing again at his reaction. "Assuming you want to!" he said playfully.

There was an audible static-scratch as Scourge's vocaliser reset. Cyclonus leaned forward to intervene, reaching out his hand. "What's the matter, Scourge? I thought you were curious about this."

"Well, yes, I was, I mean, I _am_ , but..." He hesitated. "Is this going to hurt?"

"I think you should answer that, Cyclonus!" Galvatron said, still chuckling.

Of course, it _had_ hurt - and the visible traces of that on his frame likely weren't reassuring Scourge overmuch, he realised - but that had been at least in part because _Cyclonus_ had wanted it to. _He_ had been the one begging Galvatron for _hard, rough,_ for the kind of forceful use he was accustomed to and enjoyed receiving from his lord; but the pain definitely hadn't seemed to be integral to the process. Merely an additional luxury, from his perspective.

Almost certainly a deterrent from Scourge's, though. "It _can,_ " he conceded, picking his words with some care. "But I don't think it _has_ to."

"...all right." Scourge's plating rattled quietly as he took a grip on himself and settled his wings, visibly trying not to appear too defensive. He looked between them, optics wide. "What, uh, what do I have to do?"

"You first, Cyclonus," Galvatron prompted, sitting back comfortably with a gleam in his optics. "See if you can show him!"

Cyclonus felt his lasercore pulse catch and quicken at that unexpected command. "As you wish, my lord."

This part had been easy for him and Galvatron, he realised now, because _he_ had already been ready; systems and spark on high alert, desperate for any connection to his lord that he could get. Scourge by contrast was tense as he climbed onto the recharge floor and crawled warily closer, his cooling systems whining quietly and his motive servos and cables audibly tight as he moved. "Um-?"

But he shivered and his fields flickered with wordless _want_ when Cyclonus's hands settled on his shoulder and hip. "Oh, don't be such a coward, Scourge," Cyclonus growled. "Come here."

Scourge bit back what sounded like a gasp and hesitantly shifted closer, as though he still wasn't sure whether their frames were allowed to touch. Cyclonus pulled him in, encouraging, and experimentally smoothed his hand over Scourge's shoulder; Scourge did gasp at that, another shiver running through him. His aura rippled in uncertain flux as he caught at his lockdowns and then they faltered again, glimpses of emotion flashing through. Greed, hope, doubt, dread, _want_ urgently censored with _fear-_

Cyclonus's spark went out to him. Scourge might be a coward and occasionally a fool, but he was also Cyclonus's wingmate and comrade and _part_ of their little enclave of exiles. Even leaving forged loyalties aside, he had much to recommend him. He was clever - when he kept his wits about him - and cunning, sharp-edged and cynical, pleasingly ruthless when duty or self-interest demanded it. He was their winged shadow, their optics in the dark, guardian of their secrets and despite their occasional sparring Cyclonus _trusted_ him...

"Here," he murmured, and he pulled Scourge in closer and pressed all of that into his fields as clearly as he could. _I know you, I trust you, I value you for what you are; and this is for you to share in too, if you want it._

Scourge's optics flashed in shock. He startled and made a noise embarrassingly close to a squeak, and then all of a sudden he was half in Cyclonus's lap and clinging desperately, pressing his face to Cyclonus's shoulder. His aura was a tangled shadow-skein, a swirl of conflicting emotions.

But _hope_ and _want_ at least came through clearly. Cyclonus rested a hand on the back of his helm to keep him where he was, hoping to reassure him. //Come, Scourge,// he coaxed, quiet in the secrecy of their radio connection. //No need to be afraid...//

//That's - easy for _you_ to say.// But he could feel the tension between them starting to ebb away, Scourge's fields slowly and tentatively reaching out to entwine with his. The tracker _did_ want this, of that much Cyclonus was certain now. He just needed a moment, and perhaps some encouragement, to get out of his own way and let himself accept it.

It was understandable enough. Easy to see why Scourge might conclude that it was safer to expect the worst than hope for the best, especially when the last briefing Cyclonus had given him had been _keep this quiet and don't mention it to Galvatron._ This reversal of circumstances must seem unsettlingly abrupt, even assuming that Scourge had been watching the events that led up to it. He hadn't been there _with_ them, didn't share Cyclonus and Galvatron's intuitive bond; and the one place even Scourge couldn't see was into his wingmates' thoughts.

He experimentally caressed the back of Scourge's collar. The thick armour there shielded Scourge's neck in root mode and formed the casing of his altmode's gun turret, and Cyclonus didn't anticipate it would be especially sensitive, but Scourge still shivered and rocked into the touch with a low, choked moan.

Then again, this was Scourge. He was probably more sensitive in his least reactive spots than Cyclonus was in his best ones. He swapped some extra processing power to his own tactile perceptions in response, dimming his optics and letting his attention shift outwards to the surface of his armour. Almost at once he became aware of the flow of current in Scourge's sensornets, his wingmate's schematics unfurling beneath his hand like a sketch drawn in light as he stroked slowly across midnight-blue metal. They were harder to map than Galvatron's had been; Galvatron's armour was thicker, but his baseline power levels were so much greater that they more than offset the additional damping. Galvatron was a bright light with nothing to hide. Scourge was all shadows and secrets even when he _wasn't_ actively trying to conceal anything.

Cyclonus wondered what he felt like to his wingmates by comparison, but that was hardly important now. He dismissed the thought to the back of his processors to stay focused on Scourge, who was still trembling in his grasp, but not pulling away. His hands had found their way timidly to Cyclonus's sides, their razor-sharp nails scratching tentatively against his flank panels.

He knew what those hands were capable of. He'd watched Scourge in close-combat, knew that the tracker's claws could rip through fuel lines and pierce armour, open up even other warframes as if they were stamped from tin sheet. To feel their tips graze _his_ plating sent a dark shiver of a thrill through him - not so very different, he realised, from the pleasure that lingered in his sensornets where Galvatron's hands and dentae had marked him. There was something exquisite about tasting his wingmates' capacity for destruction at first hand.

Tasting it, and trusting them not to go too far with it. Scourge probably _could_ rip half his midsection away but wasn't _going_ to, any more than Galvatron had pulled the trigger of his cannon while Cyclonus's mouth was pressed to its muzzle. And with no perceived threat substantial enough to activate his defensive coding, there was only the pleasure: the frisson of static in his sensornets as Scourge's claws brushed and _teased_ , the red-lit, oil-slicked memories of exactly how deadly the hands now cautiously touching him could be. Scourge didn't give himself enough credit, and it was a pity. If he could see himself as Cyclonus had seen him on occasion...

Well, for one thing he'd probably be a lot less of a coward. Cyclonus allowed his core engine to spin up, its low, resonant pulse hitching and then strengthening as he adjusted his gear settings. He stroked Scourge's back, across his shoulder and underneath the arch of his wing.

The hinged seam where the wing met Scourge's backplate was double-lapped and heavily reinforced to support the weight and stresses that it carried, but when Cyclonus pressed his fingertips into it and teased there with a brief flick of power from his microgenerators, Scourge reacted _beautifully_. He jumped and whimpered out loud and his fields pulsed hot and thick with charge, a silky shadow-burst of shock and pleasure and desperate _want_. "Cyc-!"

"That's better," Cyclonus murmured, an answering lick of heat twisting its way through his core. He pressed his fingers into that spot again, and Scourge moaned and clutched at him - hard enough for his claws to scratch _properly,_ and Cyclonus hissed in pleasure. That really _was_ better, in several directions.

//Please,// Scourge managed, his radio-voice shaking. //Cyc...//

//What, Scourge?//

Scourge shivered again - _he likes it when I call him by his name,_ Cyclonus realised suddenly. //Just - oh - I thought you didn't want to do this.// A cold little thread of doubt slithered questioningly through the pleasure in his fields.

As though he had to be sure his luck wasn't about to run out, even at the risk of prompting it to. Cyclonus was seized with a sudden urge to hold him closer and touch him until he _couldn't_ question any more, to peel back his wingmate's armour and find that wretched self-doubt he carried around and _bite_ it out of him. For all his faults, Scourge was _theirs_ and he was supposed to be part of whatever happened between them, always. He should _know_ that.

But this wasn't the moment to have an argument about it. //I changed my mind,// he said simply, because that was all there was to say; that he had willingly rewritten the relevant pieces of himself under Galvatron's hands, and regretted nothing. //Do _you_ still want to do this?//

//I - yes. Don't - please, Cyc...// Even over radio Scourge's voice dropped to a whisper, as though he could hardly get the words out of himself by any means at all. //...please don't stop.//

//I won't,// he soothed.

It was instructive, this change in roles. Before, with Galvatron, _he_ had been the one begging for everything, _please_ and _more_ and _don't stop_ filling his thoughts and his vocaliser. Now, with Scourge making the same pleas to him, he finally understood the delight he had tasted in Galvatron's fields. Cyclonus was effective 2IC of the army, an interrogation specialist, and a front-line fighter. He was used to the experience and the pleasure of having power over others, whether by right of rank or main force - but he _wasn't_ forcing Scourge to this, any more than Galvatron had forced him. Scourge wanted it badly enough to lay himself open and beg for it, to hand Cyclonus power over him like a _gift_.

And that was... delicious, and hunger coiled through his spark as he held his wingmate close; but it was tempered and sweetened by a surge of unexpectedly ferocious loyalty. It stroked the darkness in him to be begged and beseeched like this, but although in ordinary circumstances he had no hesitation in being cruel and indeed often enjoyed it, he also carried a spark-deep drive to _protect_ if he saw one of his wingmates vulnerable. If Galvatron or Scourge were to be damaged or endangered or losing functionality somehow, it would instantly become his primary objective to recover them, to get them to safety and supply whatever they needed to be whole and operational again by any means necessary. They would do the same for him, or for each other. It was simply part of their wing-coding; a necessary instinct, for an elite unit built to take on a universe that would never show them a merciful face.

And here and now Scourge needed _this_ , needed _him_ , and while the exact context might not be what their creator had had in mind, it was still enough to awaken those instincts. Scourge was _trusting_ him, just as he had instinctively trusted Galvatron when his own coding had collapsed in the exact same fashion - and now it made sense that Galvatron had been so quick to respond. It was so deeply satisfying to do this and see that it was effective, to feel his wingmate tremble eagerly and his fields reach out, heated with urgent pleasure and shaky with hope and fear.

He wanted more of it just as much as Scourge did. "Shh," he murmured as Scourge whimpered quietly, desperately against his shoulder. "There... like this?"


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, _fine_ , I give up. I actually have no idea how many more chapters of this fic there are going to be. Have some more porn, and just for @Severiner here's that first kiss you've been waiting for (plus some extra ones). Content notes: tactile interfacing, Scourge being insecure, Galvatron being confident enough for everyone in the room, feelings, vulnerability, etc. All consensual, within the usual caveats about D/s and chain-of-command power dynamics.

He'd been absolutely right before, Scourge thought. There was no way he was built to handle this.

It was so _much_. The tactile and cognitive feedback alone was enough to get drunk on, a flood of fresh input to systems that had been lying dead and dark forever and were now prickling urgently back to life to gorge themselves on sensation. Aches and shivers and little pulses of heat fluttered under his plating and up into his cranial space and through his lasercore. Screeds of data-for-the-sake-of-data poured from his analytical modules to his memory banks, pushed into his core storage and backed up for good measure.

He didn't need any of those new files, he knew that even as he was compiling them. There wasn't going to be some future moment when it would matter that he could remember exactly what force Cyclonus's hand was exerting on any one pressure pickup in his armour, or the precise temperature gradient between their frames that he was absent-mindedly using to deduce Cyclonus's likely current engine settings. Those were _combat_ data-handling protocols, meant to give him an edge over an enemy - but this wasn't a fight. He wasn't looking for some kind of advantage, that was the last thing that sounded like a good idea right now.

It just felt good to have all those calculations filling up some of the empty space in his processors for once. And besides, it was information _about Cyclonus_ and he wanted it for that alone, for the mere fact that Cyclonus had pulled him in close enough to get that data and wasn't trying to deny it to him. _Letting him know things_ without resisting or pushing him away... he wondered if Cyclonus even realised how generous he was being.

Probably better not to ask, just in case it made him stop. A shameful noise found its way out of his vocaliser as Cyclonus slid his fingers down, teasing his wing joint. Something along that seam must be feeding back somehow, he could feel sensor-backwash prickling all across the inside of his wing and it was maddening and wonderful all at once-

"There, like this?"

 _Yes just like that please don't stop._ He nodded urgently. "Please..."

He would be the first to admit that he tended to be conflicted about drawing anyone's attention. Given his particular specialisations, it was better and more useful for him to be overlooked and underestimated most of the time. It was also _safer_ to be ignored, and all right, call him a coward, but he _liked_ being safe.

On the other wing, being _too_ ignored led to getting _left out_.

Just as he'd expected to be from this, but now somehow he wasn't. He was in Cyclonus's arms, being watched with seeming approval or at least lack of objection by Galvatron, and he was being touched and having his wing-roots played with and his spark deliciously tortured by this sudden inexplicable kindness to him. Where had this come from? They didn't deal in _kind_.

"Scourge," Cyclonus murmured.

His tone was low and dark and turned the simple name into a caress that settled like the weight of a leadvelvet blanket. Scourge shivered and nuzzled into Cyclonus's shoulder until his lips brushed metal, barely resisting a foolhardy impulse to open his mouth and lick there to find out what his wingmate tasted like. "Cyc," he panted desperately; and then, because apparently he was determined to get himself into trouble _somehow_ , "Why?"

"Why what?"

Cyclonus's hand moved unhurriedly lower; slipping beneath the projecting armour block between his wings, touching something there that sent sparks snapping up his spinal conduits and flashing in his visual field. He gasped and twitched, and hastily reset his vocaliser because now it was obviously too late to _not_ talk. " _Hhh_ \- why are you doing this? Why _me?_ "

 _Why me when Galvatron's right there,_ but that was a question even he couldn't bring himself to ask.

"You were the one who was curious about this from the start," Cyclonus replied, as though it was obvious. His touch never faltered. "And the one who found most of the data. Galvatron agreed with me that you should be included in - whatever this is, if you wanted it." He laughed quietly, his tone wry.

Scourge couldn't begin to summon a response to that. Cyclonus had interceded for him with _Galvatron_ to get him this? Cyclonus had been the one to _want_ him here?

He made a stifled noise that was nowhere close to being words and clung to his wingmate, his autonomic responses dumping so much mechadrenaline into his fuel lines that for a moment all he could do was shake. A silky pulse of reassurance bloomed through Cyclonus's aura in response and he gasped and tried to pull the sensation closer, wanting to wrap it around himself and absorb it and _believe_ it. Usually he could detect a lie when he heard or felt one, but this time he was afraid to check too closely. He wanted so badly for this to be everything it seemed.

Even if it wasn't, though, the longer he played along the more of it he might get before - whatever happened next. So, for once, he decided he didn't want to know. Instead, he curled his trembling fingers against Cyclonus's flank and pushed _want_ and _compliance_ and a ragged effort at _trust_ into his fields as hard as he could. _Don't stop, don't..._

And Cyclonus didn't, just shifted his weight easily into the accidental scrape of Scourge's claws as though he _liked_ it, and went on carefully, systematically pressing fingertips and little shocks of charge into Scourge's armour seams. So thorough, so very typical of him; and Scourge shivered and gasped and arched into that relentless touch, his cooling systems kicking up as his engines raced and arcs of stray charge prickled over his armour. "Oh-!"

Cyclonus's fields flashed sharp with hunger. He tugged Scourge in closer against himself, and bent his head until his lips grazed the side of Scourge's helm.

Somehow, even with everything that was already being done to him, the sheer intimacy of that touch was a shock. For a moment Scourge tensed and froze; then he hastily accessed his transform cog, and folded his collar armour down as far as it would go. Still not entirely out of the way - it couldn't retract that far, no matter what he wanted - but enough to show willing.

Enough to convey, hopefully, that whatever Cyclonus wanted to do to him, Scourge was going to make it as easy for him as he could.

And apparently that had been the right thing to do and the right message to send, as Cyclonus made a satisfied sound low in his vocaliser and nuzzled Scourge's cheek ridge. Scourge choked on the answering noise he tried to make, dazed by the contact. So _close_ ; enough to hear the whisper-soft thrum of Cyclonus's cranial processors working, to feel the subtle infrared heat shed from his optic lights behind their crimson lenses...

And, as he tentatively turned his head to find out whether he was allowed to nuzzle back, close enough to catch the familiar trace-scent that clouded the air between them. Dark energon was subtly sticky, and it _lingered_. Consuming it left a residue that coated lips and glossa for a while afterward no matter how thoroughly you licked it away, a sweet echo that subliminally, dangerously urged you to keep seeking out more of it.

Which was absolutely definitely the excuse Scourge was going to give, should one be demanded, for why he stretched out his glossa and licked shyly at Cyclonus's mouth. Through the druglike rush of euphoria as his systems reacted ecstatically to even a hinted secondhand trace of their creator's power, he briefly wondered which of his wingmates was going to hurt him for this first.

But instead of asking what in the void he thought he was doing, Cyclonus made a startled noise that pitch-shifted to a groan, and instead of pushing Scourge away, he pressed their mouths together and caught Scourge's errant glossa with his own as though having it there was a _good_ thing. Which was - Scourge could only agree, sparkfelt and stunned. Cyclonus was _letting him get away with this,_ letting him steal that delicious dark-shining taste from his lips...

And underneath it was a cool, sweet, silvery taste that could only be _Cyclonus himself,_ and the idea of him getting to discover _that_ felt so impossible that he briefly wondered if he'd actually been shot down in that battle after all and this was just some dying delusion as his processors gave up. Even if it was, though, he didn't want to miss out on it. He made a desperate little sound and licked again _,_ nudging his glossa cautiously between Cyclonus's parted lips; and, with far more confidence, Cyclonus licked back.

Having someone else's glossa in his mouth was unspeakably strange, but the fact that the glossa in question had _Cyclonus_ attached to it was reason enough to accept it without a thought of protest. And then Cyclonus found and licked against the pressure sensors at the base of his upper dental ridge and he _keened_ , helplessly pleading, sucking on Cyclonus's glossa just to beg him to _keep it there and not take it back_. //Mmmh - _please_ Cyc-!//

Cyclonus _growled_. His core engine revved, low and forceful, driving shivers of resonance into Scourge's frame, and his aura flared with dominance and dark, hungry pleasure. Scourge clung to him, pushing submission and his own hunger into his fields in frantic response. His emotional regulation module felt like it was on the verge of melting, his gyros plunged as though in sudden freefall, and whether he was dying or dreaming or not he wanted more of this. _Yes, I'll do what you want, I'll do what you say, just don't stop!_

It was humiliating to need anything badly enough to plead for it like this. It was terrifying to let all his weakness and want spill out into view, to know he was giving away vulnerability he couldn't get back. Cyclonus was a code-forged strategist, he had _interrogation programming,_ he wouldn't be merciful enough to forget about this. Wouldn't forget that he'd made Scourge whimper, made him beg, and _definitely_ wouldn't forget _exactly what he'd had to do to make it happen._ Wouldn't hesitate to _use_ that knowledge if he wanted the upper hand over Scourge in future...

Well, _fine_. It wasn't like Cyclonus even needed his darkest secrets for that. He could just _ask_ and Scourge would say yes, just as he had when Cyclonus had asked him to steal blueprints for him at the beginning of all this, just as he always did no matter what his wingmate wanted. So Cyclonus could have this too, could know how much and how shamefully Scourge wanted _him_ , and he could do as he liked with that knowledge because Scourge would still want him no matter what-

"Cyclonus!"

He hadn't forgotten Galvatron was there. That was a ridiculous notion, you couldn't _forget_ about Galvatron, least of all in a confined space with the plasma burn of his fields crackling along the edge of your perceptions and the whine of artillery-grade capacitors ringing in your audials. What he _had_ done, he realised too late, was to accidentally drop Galvatron from his event projection algorithms to free up urgently-needed clock cycles for everything Cyclonus was doing to him.

He'd stopped thinking, in other words, about what Galvatron might _do_. A flash of reflexive terror shot through his circuits, coupled with a pang of shrinking loss as Cyclonus instantly broke away from him and looked around. "My lord?"

" _That_ looks interesting," Galvatron murmured, his optics glowing like forgefire and his dentae glinting at the edge of his smile. "Let me try!"

Cyclonus barely had time to startle before Galvatron reached over and seized him, pulling him up and crushing their mouths together. Scourge ducked and hastily flattened himself down out of the way without protest, _never get between Galvatron and what he wants-!_

And, momentarily forgotten or at least overlooked, _watched_. Watched as Cyclonus's head tipped back and his wings went slack in a silent cry of surrender, watched Galvatron's aura blaze with hunger and dominance and Cyclonus meet him with desire and pleasure and _worship_ , and it had been one thing to see that from three miles away but it was another altogether to be _right there_. The look on Cyclonus's face as his optics darkened in bliss, the tiny, needy, unbearable little _noises_ he was making and that Scourge would never have believed he _could_ make. The molten surge of heat and plasma-static that rolled through Galvatron's fields and the pulse of his engines shaking the floor beneath them, the way his hands tightened on Cyclonus's armour and Cyclonus arched into that grip as though he couldn't get enough of being reminded who he belonged to...

Scourge couldn't make himself be jealous. Galvatron had the right to do as he pleased to his lieutenant - well, to _both_ his lieutenants, but _obviously he'd pick Cyclonus_ \- and Cyclonus's first duty was to prioritise Galvatron's will over _everything_. Every bit of this was by the book, albeit from an illicit and heavily censored chapter that he hadn't even known the book _had_ until today. He couldn't complain, not when he'd already received so much more than he'd ever expected; and at least they were letting him watch.

But because he was who and what he was, _more than he'd expected_ wasn't even close to the same thing as _enough_. His sensornets prickled with heat, activated but unsatisfied. That familiar knotted place under his lasercore shields _ached_. He watched and wished and clenched his claws on his thighs so they wouldn't reach out without his authorisation.

And then Galvatron broke away and left Cyclonus gasping and putting out a hand to steady himself, his aura a haze of dizzy pleasure. Scourge did reach for him then, instinctively - _he's your wingmate, catch him!_ \- and Cyclonus didn't resist, just leaned without hesitation into the offered support. His fields where they lapped around Scourge's hand rippled briefly with acknowledgment and appreciation, and Scourge's spark flared with a gratitude so pathetic he almost hoped Cyclonus hadn't noticed it.

He wasn't looking, in that moment, at Galvatron; but he didn't have to be, to feel it when Galvatron looked at _him_. The Herald's gaze was always a near-physical weight, a thing of heat and force that demanded the attention of everything it touched. "Scourge?"

He jumped and looked up, twitching his wings into a hasty submission posture in case he was in trouble. "Mighty Galvatron?"

He probably wasn't in trouble, because Galvatron was smiling, and not even as though he was about to shoot someone. More as though he was _gloating,_ with a conspiratorial gleam in his optics, and he was terrifying and beautiful and Scourge's processors nearly stalled just looking at him; let alone when, still grinning, Galvatron reached out to him. "Here!"

Reality skipped like a bad sector in a saved datatrack. There had definitely been _some_ kind of momentary glitch in his systems because he had no idea what had happened between that one word and where he was _now_. Held by Galvatron's hands, chest pressed against Galvatron's glacis plate, plasma-static licking hot and hungry into the seams of his armour...

_...Galvatron's mouth on his._

Well, he could probably be forgiven a bit of lag in processing _that_. He froze, paralysed by surprise and a jolt of awestruck terror and the fact that even for him this was almost too much sensory input to cope with. _Heat, power, strength,_ and the unmistakable, unimaginable burn of _desire_ in Galvatron's fields as they engulfed him-

 _Me?_ he thought, somewhere in the tiny remaining partition of his metaprocessor where any sort of thinking was still happening at all, bewildered all over again because _surely not._ What did _he_ have that was worth that molten hunger, let alone that could possibly satisfy it?

And then Galvatron licked his mouth, the tip of his glossa sizzling with charge. Scourge had no control whatsoever over the ensuing noise he made or the way his lips parted in response, and Galvatron _pounced_.

Having Cyclonus's glossa invade his mouth had been strange and confusing and delicious. Having _Galvatron's_ do the same was far beyond all of those things. Plasma-burn and charge and the taste of dark energon flooded his throat; his own hunger took over and he sucked and swallowed urgently, desperate to get as much of that sudden onslaught of power as he could. Galvatron tasted like the fall of empires, like triumph and fire and _ruin_ , and Scourge whimpered, knowing his fields were awash with _please more don't stop_ and in no state to control them. Galvatron would just have to know how desperate he was.

//Hush, Scourge,// Galvatron murmured, light and teasing inside his head. //It's all right!//

Was it? He really hoped it was. Galvatron's hands smoothed down his back under his wings, and he arched into the touch because it was hot and bright and _glorious_ and he could feel it all the way to the deep sensors buried in his spinal architecture. Galvatron hadn't been watching idly before, apparently. He must have been taking _notes,_ because his fingertips hit all the same vulnerable spots Cyclonus had already found, pouring molten-gold power into Scourge's neural nets and etching what felt like entire new pathways into them _just for this-_

He sensed movement behind him. Through the haze of fire that swamped his awareness he caught a familiar soft laugh, and then a warm, solid weight pressed up against his back and wings.

His reaction was as incoherent over the radio as it was out loud. It still made Cyclonus laugh again, amusement and understanding coiling through his fields. Strong, self-assured hands settled on Scourge's frame; one reached around to his ventral midsection, slipping between him and Galvatron in the gap left below their chestplates, while the other gripped the side of his hip.

The shameful squeak that escaped his vocaliser was thankfully captured by Galvatron's mouth, though there was no disguising the pulse of shock and pleasure that burst through his fields. His altmode's primary vent plate was set into his midsection armour in his root mode, and Cyclonus's touch had found it. Fingertips explored its slender, blade-sharp slats, tracing their edges and flicking them back and forth.

Vertical-thrust flightframes like his weren't common, and Scourge knew the plain grey plate on his abdomen wouldn't look like much to anyone who didn't understand how his altmode worked. But its many edges were as sensitive as a winged flier's aileron flaps, and for exactly the same reason: they were loaded with finely-calibrated airflow sensors. Having them _touched_ , forcibly turned on their pivots and little sparks of charge flicked along their edges, was overwhelming.

He whined, a shudder running through him; Cyclonus pressed closer against his back and with his other hand he ran a fingertip around the rim of Scourge's left-side thruster, and _oh that just wasn't fair._ Feedback flashed both ways at once through his flight control relays and the whine became a cry that was muffled because Galvatron was still licking and nipping at his mouth, still pouring fire down his throat. He was searingly aware that he was helpless; both his wingmates were stronger and heavier than he was, and they had him captured between them. He was under no illusions that they couldn't do anything they pleased to him.

Except apparently all they wanted to do was _this_. He tried to telegraph gratitude and submission through his fields, and felt their reactions wrap around him in a molten slick of silver and gold. Pride and possessive dominance from Galvatron, warm and delighted; amusement from Cyclonus, softened with approval and something that almost felt like _protectiveness-_

Really? _Him?_

He'd shuttered his optics somewhere in the last minute, because holding Galvatron's burning gaze tested his willpower in ordinary circumstances, never mind now. There was always so much raw intensity in the Herald's look that Scourge sometimes wished his optical filters could screen out emotions as well as various spectra of radiation.

Then again, Unicron had apparently tried to construct them with as few feelings as possible on purpose. He probably hadn't foreseen that being a feature Scourge might ever need. With an effort he blinked and tentatively looked up. //Galvatron?//

Galvatron drew back, and looked down at him curiously. "Hmm?"

He'd seen Galvatron in this kind of bright, fey, playful mood before, but only rarely. He certainly hadn't ever been the immediate target of it; and while it was just as intimidating in its way as all Galvatron's other moods, somehow having it aimed directly at him made it more rather than less reassuring. The warmth of Galvatron's aura and his smile felt like all the sunrises Charr never got, and hands that could have crushed Scourge's armour and broken his struts now grasped him almost _carefully_.

As though Galvatron only meant to ensure that he wasn't going anywhere.

As though it mattered to Galvatron that Scourge _didn't_ go anywhere.

Scourge was absolutely _not_ going anywhere. Admittedly he was being held in place by Cyclonus, but even without that he would have stayed. Galvatron was looking at him, smiling at him, apparently had a _use_ for him, and the Herald's fields were golden fire and his lips glistened with the blood of a god and Scourge would...

He just managed to stop himself from thinking anything reckless. Leave the declarations of selfless sacrifice to Cyclonus, he was the one who enjoyed thoughts like that. But he'd try at least to do what Galvatron wanted... whatever that _was_. "Mighty Galvatron - what do you want me to do?"

"Do?" Galvatron repeated, as though surprised by the question. "Don't worry, Scourge, you're doing it very well already!" He grinned.

He _was?_ "Um-"

"You _are_ enjoying this, aren't you?"


End file.
